Asbestos Pipe

The asbestos pipe is a bowl material that emerged in the last quarter of the 19th century and was entirely abandoned about a generation later. It was made either by molding asbestos fiber with a binder or by applying it as a lining inside a bowl made of another material; it stood in tobacconists' display cases alongside briar, meerschaum, and clay pipes. Today it is given very little space in pipe-history narratives.

Asbestos's Years of Prestige

Named from an Ancient Greek word meaning "unquenchable," asbestos was industry's favorite material in the second half of the 19th century: insulation, fire curtains, brake linings, machine gaskets. Mining that began in the 1870s at the Thetford deposits in Quebec, Canada, made the fiber both more abundant and cheaper within a few decades. With a fire-resistant, lightweight raw material that took whatever shape was wanted readily at hand, it is not surprising that pipe makers tried it.

The first record of the danger dates to the same years. The 1898 annual report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops in Great Britain, based on the observations of Lucy Deane Streatfeild, one of the first female factory inspectors, documented the harm of asbestos dust. By contrast, the first description of the disease in medical literature came only in 1924, and the first British regulation aimed at the asbestos industry was published in 1931.