Kilmer House

In honor of the 125th birthday of Johnson & Johnson this year, here are 12.5 things you didn’t know about Johnson & Johnson:

1. Johnson & Johnson and the American College of Surgeons co-sponsored the first televised surgical operation in 1947.  The procedure was transmitted from an operating room at the New York Hospital to an audience of 300 people at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, two miles away.  [Johnson & Johnson Bulletin Oct/Nov 1972]

2. The founding of Johnson & Johnson is mentioned in the novel The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.  The mention comes in a diary entry by one of the characters, a nurse who had tended the wounded during the Civil War.  The character in the book writes an 1886 diary entry about reading a newspaper article saying that Robert Wood Johnson was starting a company called Johnson & Johnson to manufacture mass produced sterile surgical dressings.  The character reflects on how useful those dressings would have been to help the wounded during the Civil War. (Thanks to P.S.F. for pointing that out!)

3. Johnson & Johnson was founded in 1886, but the oldest business in the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies dates all the way back to 1838. That business is Codman, an operating company that’s now part of DePuy, Inc. The origins of the Codman business go back to 1838 with Thomas Codman, who started a medical and surgical device company in Massachussetts…years before the founders of Johnson & Johnson were born.  Codman & Shurtleff  (Asahel Shurtleff was the other partner) supplied surgical instruments to doctors during the Civil War...the conflict in which two older brothers of the Johnson & Johnson founders fought.

4. Proving that it’s truly a small world, Codman & Shurtleff also was an exhibitor at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition – where Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson heard a lecture by Sir Joseph Lister and was inspired to start Johnson & Johnson.  The Codman website has a photo of a section of their 1876 first-place exhibit at the Centennial Exhibition...which Robert Wood Johnson no doubt visited in person before he founded the company that would acquire them 88 years later.  The online Centennial Exhibition website also has a photo of the full exhibit.  Codman joined the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies in 1964.

5. In the 1940s, Natone (the future Neutrogena Corporation) supplied 75% of all the lipstick brushes sold in the United States.  According to information in our archives, that business success earned the founder of Natone, Emanuel Stolaroff, the distinction of being called “The Lip Brush King” in the U.S.  There’s a picture of him on the Neutrogena website here.

6. In 1928, in order to inaugurate the first Aerokit (an airplane First Aid Kit) made by Johnson & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson took one of the kits on a biplane flight to a "northern flying field."  [The RED CROSS® Messenger, March 1928]

7. Speaking of First Aid Kits, the Company’s Autokit in the late 1920s came with an oval metal plaque that could be attached to the front of a car, stating that the car was “J&J First Aid Equipped.”  

8. And while we’re on the subject of Autokits, Sir Malcolm Campbell, the famous race car driver who broke the world’s record for speed in 1928 by racing at 206.9 miles per hour at Daytona Beach, Florida, had a Johnson & Johnson Autokit in his car when he broke that record.

9. Johnson & Johnson launched what was billed as "the world's first diesel electric freight boat" in 1928, the Edward Farrington (named after a former Mayor of New Brunswick).  [The RED CROSS® Messenger, March 1928]  The Farrington was designed with a diesel electric engine in order to cut down on coal wastage and harbor smoke.

10. 83 years ago, Johnson & Johnson had a big arrow painted on the roof of one of its New Brunswick buildings.  What was the purpose of the arrow?  It was to point air mail pilots in the direction of nearby Hadley Field in South Plainfield, which at the time was the eastern terminus of the United States’ air mail system.

11. When television became a part of American life in the 1950s, Johnson & Johnson was one of the first companies to advertise on it, sponsoring early shows like The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Donna Reed Show, Cheyenne and Gunsmoke.

12. Over 100 years ago, Johnson & Johnson made a line of papaya-based products to help ease indigestion, under the brand name Papoid.

12.5  Joyce Kilmer, son of Johnson & Johnson Director of Scientific Affairs Fred Kilmer and author of the famous poem “Trees” wasn’t the only member of the Kilmer family to have a connection to plants. In the 1930s, St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. had a garden of medicinal plants started by Fred Kilmer, which included plants from around the world.  Many of those plants came from Kilmer’s own garden. It was the only hospital garden of its kind in the United States at that time.