Johns-Manville and other early asbestos cement manufacturers, including Baltimore Roofing & Asbestos Manufacturing Company, Inc., Flintkote Company, Keasbey Mattison Company, Philip Carey Manufacturing Company, focused on the production a wide spectrum of asbestos cement products, pretty much all throughout the first half of the 19th century.
In 1907, the asbestos industry was blessed with another revolutionary invention. The Austrian engineer Ludwid Hatschek found a way to manufacture asbestos cement products by using a new approach. His invention, the Hatschek machine, introduced a third roller for wet transfer to produce asbestos cement sheets. The other, back then state of the art manufacturing processes were: Mazza process for pipes and the semi-dry Magnani process for corrugated asbestos cement sheets. These sheets were so popular, because they were very light in weight, water resistant , durable, incombustible, and resistant to termites, soiling warping, corrosion and fire, and further to that, very easy to clean and maintain. Another outstanding characteristic of asbestos cement is its low thermal conductivity, which made it predestined for electrical insulations.
With these new refinement and asbestos cement production procedures, the door was open to a plethora of commercial products, including synthetic asbestos roof and wall shingles, corrugated wall panels, ceiling moldings and wall decorations.
Other products included bathroom tiles, water pipes, acoustical materials, laboratory equipment, electrical switchboard panels and more. In sum, asbestos cement products were appreciated as particularly useful for all kind of lightweight building and construction projects.
In the early 1920s the National Board of Fire Underwriters issued a recommendation, suggesting that home owners should install fire resistant roof covering to replace the wooden shingles, which were perceived as highly susceptive to hazards. Among a broad variety of solutions, the asbestos cement roofing was one of the board approved suggestions. Historically, this can bee seen as a true milestone, because the public accepted the material as product, recommended by a nationally renowned organization. In the beginning, asbestos roof shingles were manufactured in three standard colors: blue-black, Indian red and natural cement grey. Primarily, we saw two designs: Hexagonal, which resembles the shape of a diamond, and Dutch lap, comparable to regular wood shingles.
These new asbestos roofing shingles were much lighter than tile or slate, and only marginally heavier than the traditional wooden shingles. Later on, more shapes were introduced to the market, like the Poilite Straight Cover Slating, which came in squares, the scalloped tile, the so called Bell's Pan, and the Endurol. Over course of time it became clear that when the asbestos cement shingle was properly installed, the roof regularly outlasted the rest of the building it was placed on.