1918: Frederick Hoffman, a medical statistician for the Prudential Life Insurance Company, reported in a United States Department of Labor Bulletin that American life insurance companies generally deny coverage to asbestos workers because of the “assumed health-injurious conditions of the industry.” 

1922: Louis Dublin, a statistician for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, writes that asbestos workers are at risk of injury to the lungs.

1942: An Owens Corning corporate memorandum refers to “medical literature on asbestosis… [and] scores of publications in which the lung and skin hazards of asbestos are discussed.”

1942-43: The president of Johns-Manville says that the managers of another company were “a bunch of fools for notifying employees who had asbestosis.” When one of the people in attendance ask, “Do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they drop dead?” According to deposition testimony, the response was, “Yes. We save a lot of money that way.”

1944: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company finds 42 cases of asbestosis among 195 asbestos miners.

1944: The Journal of the Medical Association reports that asbestos is one of the “agents known or suspected to cause occupational cancer.”

1948: The American Petroleum Institute’s Medical Advisory Committee, whose members include oil giants, received a summary of a paper in which the chief pathologist for E.I. DuPont De Nemours & Co. suggested that the industry “aim at the complete elimination of the exposure” to asbestos.

1951: Asbestos companies remove all references to cancer before allowing publication of research they sponsor concerning exposure to asbestos.

1953: National Gypsum’s safety director wrote to the Indiana Division of Industrial Hygiene, recommending that acoustic plaster mixers wear respirators “because of the asbestos used on the product.” Another company official notes that the letter was “full of dynamite,” and urges that the letter be retrieved before reaching its destination. A memo from those files notes that the company “succeeded in stopping” the letter which “will be modified.”

1964: Dr. Irving Selikoff publishes a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, proving that people who work with asbestos containing materials have an abnormal incidence of asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma.

1989 and 1991: In 1989, the United States Environmental Protection Agency bans asbestos and most of its uses, but, in 1991, asbestos companies win a federal lawsuit which overturns the EPA’s asbestos ban.

1999: The Florida Supreme Court rules that Owens Corning willfully withheld information about the dangers of working with the company’s asbestos products. The Florida Supreme Court describes it as a “blatant disregard for human safety involving large numbers of people.