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Notable New     Yorkers
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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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dollars - which I presented myself and advertised all over the State of New York, for anybody who would discover a method of preventing the exposure to silica dust. We itemized the places where it was most common - the foundation drilling in New York being the major one that we knew of then; the others being the grinding trades and so forth. There later proved to be others that we hadn't even known of. I never thought of glass polishing as being a silica hazard, but it was. We knew it was there in glass cutting.

There was a company that made these great glass lined milk trucks where the interior had to be absolutely smooth. What they'd been doing was to send a man with a polisher and grinder inside this little tight enclosure. There he had worked, smoothed, ground and smoothed it all off. We had a case of a couple of men who got silicosis that way.

We had a great many of them coming up from strange places when we began to talk about it.

I offered a prize and did a lot of advertising and a lot of speaking. I got the Governor to talk about it. I got other people to talk about it. I went before Boards of Trade, Rotary Clubs. I spoke to some of the construction men at some convention they had in New York. I spoke about this prize and said they had the biggest exposure to silica in the New York City foundation work and so why couldn't





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