If you were asked to name a wonder material, what would you say?

Silicon, plastics, maybe graphene?

All good choices.

But for people in the mid-1900s, the choice would have been clear.

Asbestos.

That might seem like a shocking answer.

Isn't asbestos deadly?

Yes, it causes terrible lung diseases.

It's every bit as bad as you have heard.

But that is not the full store.

Asbestos probably saved far more lives than it cost, millions of them.

And in a wider sense, it remade the entire world. Asbestos isn't just a historical

relic either. Odds are, there's asbestos in your home or office right now. As much as we'd like to,

the world simply cannot forget asbestos.

From the Science History Institute, this is Sam Kean and the Disappearing Spoon,

a topsy, turvy, sciencey history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

Many people feel, however vaguely, that natural things are better and more wholesome than

artificial things. Artificial things seem dangerous. They pollute the environment and

poison us. But asbestos complicates that tidy division. Asbestos is both deadly and wholly natural.

It comes right from mother nature, just like cotton and wood. Asbestos is made of the same material as sand,

silicon dioxide. It forms when silicon dioxide dissolves in hot water and precipitates out under high pressure.

Microscopically, it's made of very thin fibers, like cotton candy.

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