How would they have known, really? This was a real tip in the very early 1900s iirc, and back then everything gave you cancer or rotted one or more of your organs. We put asbestos, lead, and radium in literally everything.
It’s kind of a wonder that within 100 years, we managed to identify what things caused which cancer. Like at the time, your jaw would start rotting off and, looking for a cause, you could gesture broadly at everything.