Asbestos and Fire

Reviewed by: Asbestos and Fire: Technological Trade-Offs and the Body at Risk Scott Gabriel Knowles (bio) Asbestos and Fire: Technological Trade-Offs and the Body at Risk. By Rachel Maines . New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+254. $34.95. December 7, 1946, with memories of Pearl Harbor and all the other terrors of World War II still fresh, a fire broke out at Atlanta's Winecoff Hotel, rapidly consuming the building, killing 119 and sending 64 people to the hospital. The precode Winecoff stood fifteen stories, but was without fire escapes. It was "absolutely fireproof," but had only a single stairwell furnished in wood, burlap, and carpets, and was without landings or fire doors. The fire department's ladders only reached to the eighth floor, a death sentence for 80 percent of the unfortunates stranded above that height—among them a number of recently returned veterans, thirty teenagers in town for a mock legislative session, and five children under age 8. It was, in short, exactly the type of fire tragedy that Americans experienced throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in their theaters and schools, workplaces and hotels, in the risky built environments of the fire-ready industrial age. A year later, President Harry Truman called a conference to address such preventable waste. Rachel Maines writes that "Truman, who had seen the destruction of Germany and Japan with incendiary warfare a few years before, knew that no homeland is secure in which 10,000 persons a year are dying in more than 830,000 fires" (p. 117). But, how could the nation be made safe from fire rapidly, and without crushing expense? There was an answer at hand. In Asbestos and Fire: Technological Trade-Offs and the Body at Risk, Maines traces the career of a seemingly wondrous material—asbestos—and the ways in which it helped to end the American age of great conflagrations, while at the same time opening the lungs of Americans to the dangers of asbestosis and mesothelioma. In the tradition of books like Jeff Meikle's American Plastic (1995) and Tom Misa's A Nation of Steel (1998), Asbestos and Fire skillfully demonstrates the socioeconomic forces [End Page 175] shaping, and ultimately limiting, the development of a ubiquitous industrial material. The book begins with a run through the premodern history of asbestos. "Asbestiform metamorphic rocks," to be precise, are the only minerals that can be spun and woven. Chinese sources reference asbestos, or the "fireproof cloth" in antiquity, as do Pausanius, Plutarch, Dioscorides, and Pliny the Elder, who was the first to use the term "asbestos" and referred to it as "linen . . . used for making shrouds for royalty which keep the ashes of the corpse separate from the rest of the pyre" (p. 26). From the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Maines locates tantalizing anecdotes of asbestos cloth used as relics, proof of their authenticity—as pieces of the true cross, a "Buddha garment," or a towel used by Jesus to wash the disciples' feet—being their mystifying incombustibility. By the seventeenth century, asbestos had become a source of scientific inquiry, appearing frequently in the Philosophical Transactions; and from there we move to the nineteenth century, where asbestos is commonly discussed in Scientific American and Science, its uses varied but tending more and more toward industrial applications like the boiler packing, roofing, cloth, and insulation exhibited by Henry W. Johns at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. It is here, as Maines moves into the urban-industrial age, that the book takes on its central task: to demonstrate a set of critical contexts in which repeated visitations by catastrophic fires led to an incremental, but ultimately highly professionalized and systematic application of fireproofing technologies such as asbestos. For example, theater fires proved a constant hazard in cities around the world throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, claiming thousands of lives. School fires, like the one that took ninety-five lives at Our Lady of the Angels school in Chicago (1958), and hotel fires such as that at the Winecoff clearly showed that cities would not inevitably grow safe, but rather would remain vulnerable until fireproof materials were

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