In the early 1900s, the world was in love with the wonders of asbestos and, truly, it is an amazing mineral that is mined from the earth. If it didn’t cause cancer, we could have used it numerous household items.
A Stone That Floats
A queer product of nature is asbestos. It is a sort of mineral-vegetable substance, both fibrous and crystalline, elastic and brittle. It may be called a stone that floats. It is carded, spun, and woven, just as are flax and silk.
Asbestos is mined in various parts of the world. The asbestos of one country varies as greatly in appearance from that of another country as does the foliage of the trees and plants native to each. There is, however, one quality that all asbestos, no matter whence derived, possesses, and that is its indestructibility. No known combination of acids, it is said, affects the strength, or indeed even the appearance, of its fiber. The fiercest flames leave it unscathed.
Some varieties of asbestos are as compact in texture as marble, taking the highest polish, while others show extremely loose, silky fibers. “Mountain wood” is a variety presenting an irregular, filament structure like wood, and other forms of asbestos are rock cork, mountain leather, fossil paper, and fossil flax.
Asbestos is really a species of amphibole or hornblende, composed of separable filaments with silky luster. Its color varies greatly, passing through many shades of white, gray, green, brown, red, and even black.
In some cities firemen are provided with asbestos clothing, which practically defies the flames, the men being enabled to pass through a blaze unscathed if no longer is required than the time they can hold their breath. Asbestos roofing will eliminate all danger of fire from falling sparks. Millions of feet of steam pipes, boilers, etc. are covered with this material, so that all heat may be retained; while asbestos also forms frost proof protection for gas and water pipes.
One of the thousand special uses to which asbestos is applied is that of covering walls. Instead of plaster, a single sheet of asbestos is placed upon the raw bricks. The wall may be covered with this material as soon as built, and a room the walls of which were completed in the morning shows that night an interior as smoothly finished as glass and as hard as stone. Then too, this glossy surface, while perfectly firm, will not crack.
Source: Evening Star. Newspaper. August 30, 1914.
