Johns-Manville Asbestos Fibre Division, How Asbestos Fibre Users Can Profit from New Packing and Handling Methods (1956)

A short booklet, "Engineering Report: How asbestos fibre users can profit from new packing and handling methods," prepared by the engineering section of Johns-Manville's Asbestos Fibre Division as "A Johns-Manville Service to Industry" and printed in Canada. It promotes J-M's "Pressure-Packed" bags of raw asbestos fiber for savings in freight, storage and handling, and recommends opening the compressed fiber with a fiber-opening machine, the Moody "Fibre Fluffer," before mixing it into products such as asphalt compounds.

What it shows

The booklet is addressed to manufacturers who bought J-M's raw fiber from its Canadian mines. It says the tighter bags meant "cleaning and dusting minimized" and that fiber "cannot sift through bags" in transit, but it presents these as savings, not health measures. The fiber opener, shown in photographs and layout diagrams, restored the fiber to a "light, feathery mass" before use. Nothing in the booklet mentions the health of the workers opening, fluffing or mixing the fiber. Sales offices are listed in New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco, with the division's headquarters at Asbestos, Quebec.

About this copy

This is a microfilm copy (reel JWZ288). A handwritten note on the frames reads "Asbestos 1956 Packing & Handling Methods File 60."