Asbestos got its name by mistake from a Roman who confused it with lime
In ancient Greek, the word asbestos meant quicklime. Pliny the Elder, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, attached it to the fireproof mineral fibre, and the error stuck in English. Greeks called the fibre amiantos, undefiled, because it came out of a fire unmarked, and Spanish and Italian still say amianto.
Asbestos is not one mineral but six kinds of natural silicate, all made of long, thin crystals. Each fibre splits into countless microscopic fibrils, which abrasion can release into the air. It insulates against heat and electricity superbly and resists fire, qualities people have exploited for thousands of years in flexible fabrics such as napkins. Pliny described it as costlier than pearls, and Wei dynasty China, from 386 to 535, prized fire-laundered cloth.
The oldest known use is about 4,500 years old. Around Lake Juojärvi in eastern Finland, potters mixed the variety anthophyllite into clay to strengthen pots and cooking utensils, a ware archaeologists call asbestos-ceramic. Some scholars think ancient peoples wrapped royal corpses in asbestos on funeral pyres to keep the ashes pure; others say it made lamp wicks that never burned away, the idea behind the Greek name. Around 318, Athanasius of Alexandria used unburnable Indian asbestos as an image of fire defeated. Popular accounts credit Pliny or his nephew with spotting its harm, but the original texts support neither claim.
Large-scale mining began in the late 19th century, and for most of the 20th asbestos was a standard building material worldwide. Its dangers became widely acknowledged in the 1970s, and buildings from before the 1980s often contain it. Breathing the fibres can cause asbestosis, a scarring of the lungs, as well as mesothelioma and lung cancer, typically about 20 years after exposure.
That delay, plus the asbestos still in old buildings, means asbestos-linked illness is estimated to kill around 255,000 people annually, even though 66 countries ban it completely and many more regulate it strictly. Mining continues for developing economies, and Russia, the top producer, turned out an estimated 790,000 tonnes in 2020.
Source: Asbestos
