Kilmer House

Strange But True:  The Baby Powder that Helped Launch a Rocket

1. JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder was used by NASA to help insure the successful launch of the Apollo 8 spacecraft in 1968.  The rocket had a rubber strip holding together a covering that protected a measuring instrument.  NASA needed a means to insure that the rubber strip could slide off freely during the rocket’s launch.  A NASA engineer used some JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder that he brought in from home.  It did the job so well that he planned to use it on all subsequent Apollo launches.  [The Bulletin, The J&J Employee Magazine, February/March 1969, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, p. 10]

 2. In 1970, advice columnist Ann Landers noted in her nationally syndicated newspaper column that Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, N.J. had “the most immaculate and best laid out ladies room I’ve ever seen anywhere….”  Ann Landers presumably travelled quite a bit, so that recognition was a singular honor.  [The Bulletin, the Johnson & Johnson Employee Magazine, August 1970, Volume 28, No. 6] 

Some of the Company’s Early Medicated Plasters

3. Medicated plasters, one of our earliest products in the 1800s, could not be manufactured on very humid days, because the humidity interfered with the manufacturing process.  (Which must have been challenging in the pre-air conditioning days over 100 years ago in humid Central New Jersey, where the plasters were manufactured.)   

James Wood Johnson 

4. In 1918 Company president James Wood Johnson was presented with an award by the Russian government for supplying something that helped the Russian army during World War I.  (Russia and the U.S. were allies during World War I.)  Was it sterile bandages or dressings?  No:  it was horseshoes.  Johnson had bought an interest in the Neverslip Horseshoe Company in New Brunswick, which had filled the largest order in its history for the Russian cavalry. We still have one of the horseshoes in our archives today.

McNeil family pharmacy: the origin of one of our operating companies

5. Company founder Robert Wood Johnson, Scientific Director Fred Kilmer, Revra DePuy (founder of our affiliate company DePuy, Inc.), and the McNeil family (founders of McNeil Laboratories, which became part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies in 1959) all had one thing in common.  What was it?  They all started their careers in retail pharmacies.

Philip B. Hofmann

6. Philip B. Hofmann, chairman and chief executive officer of Johnson & Johnson from 1963 to 1973, spent part of his early career here successfully selling the Company’s most notoriously hard to sell product:  Lister’s Dog Soap.  And by the way, Hofmann’s father – who steered his son toward joining Johnson & Johnson – was a retail pharmacist too.

7. When television became part of American life in the early 1950s, Johnson & Johnson became one of its first major sponsors with TV ads and sponsorship of specific shows.  Some of the early shows the Company sponsored were The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Donna Reed Show, Cheyenne and Gunsmoke.

Frederick Barnett Kilmer

Fred Kilmer, the Company’s Chief Scientific Officer from 1889 to 1934, took his role as a scientist, writer, guardian of public health and educator of the public very seriously.  But he was not against ever so subtly lightening things up a little bit every now and then.  Here’s an example from a 1914 issue of THE RED CROSS MESSENGER.  Sandwiched between articles on the importance of First Aid, advice for druggists on how to effectively decorate drugstore windows to increase their business, and the proper use of Synol Soap, the Company’s antibacterial soap, is a picture of…Fred Kilmer’s cat.

Tom Rutgers, with a “Don’t Mess with Me” look

As everyone who’s ever put together a publication knows, you need to fill up the empty spaces on the page.  Kilmer, as editor of the MESSENGER and its sister publication for doctors and surgeons, RED CROSS NOTES, often included small ads for Johnson & Johnson products, photographs of pharmacies proudly sent in by pharmacists throughout the U.S. and the world, and pictures sent in by parents of their babies and toddlers playing with JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder tins.

Occasionally the reader of THE RED CROSS MESSENGER would find a photograph of a dog whose coat was kept clean and healthy with Lister’s Dog Soap (yes, that was a Johnson & Johnson product) or a famous athlete or actress of the day who used one of our products.

Kilmer was a thorough professional and in THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, he was dedicated to educating retail druggists about the importance of pharmacy as a profession, about how to increase their business (and by extension, the Company’s sales) and on the Company’s philosophy and the science behind Johnson & Johnson products.  But very rarely, he let something more personal show through.  In one issue, he ran a short poem by his son Joyce Kilmer.  In another issue, it was a picture of his cat.

Of course, Kilmer, being the devoted writer and educator that he was, couldn’t just run a picture of his cat by itself.  Just as Kilmer’s son Joyce had helped his father by writing articles for Johnson & Johnson publications, Tom Rutgers the cat also lent a hand (or a paw) in service of Kilmer’s educational goals.  Kilmer accompanied Tom’s photo with a short article, “The Drug Store Cat,” which traced the earliest origins of medicine and pharmacy all the way back through the ages to alchemy and magic, which were of course were associated with…cats, and black cats, specifically.  (Alert blog readers will note from the picture above that Tom Rutgers was a black cat.)  Kilmer went so far as to say:

“A cat is a most useful adjunct of a well appointed drug store.  Reputed as the embodiment of wisdom and mystery, a black cat might, with propriety, be chosen as one of the symbols of pharmacy.”  [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, Vol. VI, No. 12, May 1914, p. 711]

Another reason cats were probably such a “useful adjunct of a well appointed drug store” in the late 1800s and early 1900s was the fact that they kept mice away.  So why the name Tom Rutgers?   It could have been for any number of reasons, such as the proximity of Kilmer’s College Avenue house to Rutgers (his address was listed as 147 College Avenue by the 1906 Yearbook of the American Pharmaceutical Association)…or the fact that Kilmer’s son Joyce went to Rutgers Prep, and then to Rutgers College before finishing his education at Columbia University….or it could have been something else entirely.  Only Tom Rutgers, the feline symbol of pharmacy, and Fred Kilmer, the former retail pharmacist, knew the answer.

By the way, it’s remarkable how many of the people in the early history of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies started as clerks in retail pharmacies:  Robert Wood Johnson the first, Fred Kilmer, Alexander Lewis, the Company’s early corporate secretary and head of sales; the McNeil brothers and Revra DePuy, who founded the first-ever orthopaedics Company. Here’s a picture of Fred Kilmer (left) and Alexander Lewis (right), posing for an early ad:

James Wood Johnson

Most people, unless they read this blog, have probably never heard of James Wood Johnson, one of the three brothers who founded Johnson & Johnson in 1886.  But more than a billion people around the world are familiar with his handwriting.  Why?  Because the Johnson & Johnson logo is based on it.

James Wood Johnson’s signature

Johnson & Johnson logo circa 1920s

This familiar logo has been a part of Johnson & Johnson since the beginning.  It’s not a typeface, but is based on handwriting…one particular person’s handwriting.  You can see the similarities between the shape of the “J,” the loop on the “h” and in the “s” in James’s handwriting and in the logo.  You’ll also notice above that James Wood Johnson connected the “W” in his middle initial to the “J” in Johnson.  When James wrote the name Johnson & Johnson, he did the same thing: he connected the ampersand to the second “J.” 

Company name written by James Wood Johnson on a check in 1886.  Note the connection of the ampersand and the second “J”

As I mentioned in a previous post, James Wood Johnson and his brother Edward Mead Johnson are the Johnsons in “Johnson & Johnson.”  Their older brother Robert joined the Company several months later, once he was free of his obligations to his previous business, Seabury & Johnson.   (It’s a measure of the founders’ foresight that they didn’t change the Company name to “Johnson & Johnson & Johnson” when this happened.)

One of the Company’s earliest products.  The logo looks even more like a signature here.

The new company wanted a visual identity that would set it apart from its competitors in the medical products field.  The Johnsons’ new business was indeed different – it sold the first commercial mass-produced sterile surgical dressings, as well as sterile sutures, and it improved the manufacturing and the efficacy of the popular medicated plasters it sold.  So the Johnson brothers wanted a distinctive way to represent their new business’s name.

If anyone has ever wondered about how companies come up with their logos (okay, maybe ONE person out there has ever wondered about that), it’s probably assumed that they hire design firms who submit designs that are tested and re-tested and then one is chosen…which is how you would come up with a logo today.  But we’ve had the same logo for well over a century.  So what did companies do in the 1800s?

In the 1800s, most companies just set their names in type…like the Lambert Pharmacal Company, which was formed to manufacture LISTERINE® Antiseptic.  Or Seabury & Johnson.  Or P&G.

A few companies, like the Coca-Cola Company (also founded in 1886) had distinctive logos that gave people immediate visual recognition and a set of expectations, based on their products.  (In modern times, we would call that branding.)  From its earliest days, Johnson & Johnson used what we call our corporate signature as the distinctive way of representing the Company. 

Here’s the logo on some of our earliest products:     

It’s not only the Johnson & Johnson logo that’s based on James Wood Johnson’s handwriting, but also the JOHNSON’S® brand name logo too.  Here’s an example…in which it’s easy to see how both logos evolved from James Wood Johnson’s signature.

JOHNSON’S® Baby Cream, 1920s 

Interestingly enough, the signatures of Robert Wood Johnson the first and his brother James Wood Johnson are kind of similar, especially in the way they signed their last name.  So although the logo is based on James’ signature, it also looks like Robert’s too.

 The signatures of James Wood Johnson (top) and Robert Wood Johnson (bottom) 

The fact that Johnson & Johnson based the look of its name on one of the founder’s handwriting shows how personally the Johnson brothers were connected to their company, their products and their mission of improving health care for people…personally enough for one of them to put his signature on it.

A Peek Inside One of Our Offices in the Mid-1940s

1. The Company started on the fourth floor of an old wallpaper factory.

2. In the Nineteen-teens, before air conditioning, Johnson & Johnson had a swimming pool for employees – at work! — so they could cool off in the summer heat.

3. When he was younger, Robert Wood Johnson the first was known to wear a stovepipe hat.  (We don’t have a picture of him wearing the hat in our archives, unfortunately.)

4. Barry Manilow wrote the “I Am Stuck on BAND-AID® Brand…” jingle.

5. John Travolta, Terri Garr and Brooke Shields all appeared in BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage commercials before they became famous.

6. During World War II, Hollywood movie star Hedy Lamarr came to Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick for a war bonds rally.  She wasn’t just a pretty face; she invented a technology that made modern wireless communication possible.

7. We used to make duct tape.  Permacel, the company that invented duct tape, was a part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies until 1982.

8. One of our most recently acquired consumer products, the BENGAY® Pain Relieving Patch, does the same thing that medicated plasters did in 1887 – it delivers pain relief directly through the skin. 

9. One of the founders of Johnson & Johnson (Robert Wood Johnson), the founder of DePuy, Inc., and one of the founders of our McNeil franchise all started out working as clerks in retail pharmacies.

10. We used to own a company that made sausage casings, which evolved from research into the possibility of developing collagen as an absorbable suture product.  Collagen never panned out as suture material, but Devro, the company that resulted from that research, is still going strong.  It was part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies until 1991, when its management bought it out and spun it off. 

11. Okay, 11 things.  Here’s one more as a bonus.  We made a tooth-whitening tooth cream in 1887.

Throughout its history, Johnson & Johnson has been known for developing and making products in response to needs in society…such as the first commercially available sterile surgical dressings.  Occasionally, though, the Company produced a product that helped fill a more unusual need in society.  One early product filled not a health care need, but a fashion craze.  And that product was…Beauty Spots.    

Beauty Spots were small pieces of material – usually black silk or sometimes velvet – with adhesive on the back.  They were most commonly shaped like small stars, crescents, arrows, hearts or circles.  Beauty Spots were used by women to attract attention to the complexion or an outstanding facial feature, such as the eyes, mouth, or a dimple.  They would stick the product on their faces near whatever facial feature they wanted to accentuate.  Occasionally, according to sources, women would use a number of them at once, which gave them the unfortunate appearance of having broken out in oddly shaped spots. 

In 1915, the Company wrote:

“To supply the demand created by this fashion we have arranged an assortment of designs consisting of stars, crescents, arrow points, hearts, etc., which are put up in envelopes, each containing 100 spots (3 dozen on a card); also in fancy boxes containing 300 assorted.”  [RED CROSS MESSENGER p. 286, March 1915, Vol. VII, No. 10.]

It was typical of Johnson & Johnson that, rather than just putting the product on the market (where it was bought by fashion-conscious women), the people at the Company felt the need to provide some education and background about its Beauty Spots.  So Fred Kilmer wrote about them in the March, 1915 issue of THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, the Johnson & Johnson publication for the retail druggists who sold our products.

According to Fred Kilmer, Beauty Spots were worn in Ancient Rome and Egypt, and there was a beauty spot fad in 17th century France during the reign of Louis XIII, and in England during the reign of Queen Anne.  Kilmer included an illustration from an old treatise on Beauty Spots (shown below) that shows someone wearing a number of them at once, including an elaborate horse-drawn carriage running entirely across her forehead!

RED CROSS MESSENGER Reproduction of Old Illustration Showing Beauty Spots in Use

Johnson & Johnson made Beauty Spots out of materials left over from making plasters.  Since 1887, Johnson & Johnson had been making Court Plasters, which had the same origins but were the more practical cousin to Beauty Spots.  To confuse matters, Beauty Spots were sometimes referred to as Court Plasters, a name that goes back to their origins in the royal courts of Europe.  They had been used by court women, who set the fashions in their day.  According to Fred Kilmer, Court Plasters started out as fashion statements, before being used by the masses to cover small cuts and scratches. 

Court Plasters were small and adhesive, and came in little pocket-sized sheets that could be cut to size to cover up a small scrape or cut.  They were made of luxurious materials like silk and taffeta, and came in a variety of colors.  (A tradition that was later continued by BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages!) 

Continuing the Court Plaster Tradition?

Johnson & Johnson also made Court Plasters from isinglass, a material derived from fish scales.

Cotolia Liquid Court Plaster

Oddly enough, the Company also made a liquid Court Plaster to put over small wounds, which sounds a lot like this modern product.  (You will need to scroll down to the second product on the page.)

Fred Kilmer attributed the revival of Beauty Spots to the revival of little “vanity boxes” that could be carried in a purse.  They contained a mirror and could hold small items, such as a sheet of Beauty Spots. 

Beauty Spots Packaging, Product and Vanity Boxes

The Company provided educational background not just on its lifesaving products, but on its more unusual products as well, and Beauty Spots were no exception.  Why?  So that the druggists selling the products would understand them and be knowledgeable enough to answer the public’s questions. 

There’s a little-known legend surrounding the Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters site in New Brunswick.  The legend concerns the fact that when one of the old buildings was removed some years ago, a tunnel leading to the Raritan River was discovered.  There has been a lot of speculation about the purpose of that tunnel.  Was it an old, abandoned mine tunnel from before the days of Johnson & Johnson?  Did it have something to do with the Revolutionary War?  Or – an even more intriguing possibility — could it have been a part of the Underground Railroad,* which had several stops in New Jersey and ran through New Brunswick? 

Well here’s the answer:  the tunnel was connected to the Company’s water supply.  It’s somewhere around 100 years old and was used to provide access to a water source for Johnson & Johnson.  

This photo from our archives is dated “Approx 1909” on the back and is titled “J&J Tunnel to Cond…for River Water.”  Pictured in the photo are Aaron Manley, Joseph Witte, Edward Dawson, and Andrew Manley.

Johnson & Johnson needed an abundant supply of water for its manufacturing operations.  The closest source of water was naturally the Raritan River.  At that time, long before Route 18 was built, the Company’s property went right down to the water. 

Since the Raritan was muddy, Johnson & Johnson commissioned an elaborate water filtration system to purify the water that was used.  The filtration system, state of the art for the early 1900s, used sand, a purifying compound and compressed air.  After that, the water was visually inspected and then tested to make sure it was clean.  Scientific Director Fred Kilmer wrote that the Company’s filtration system was “…able to produce somewhat over one million gallons in 24 hours,” an astonishing amount.   (RED CROSS MESSENGER, Vol. V, No. 10, March 1913, p. 286 “Clean Water.”)

Kilmer often looked ahead to what he thought the future might bring.  He frequently tied his writing about the Company’s products to needs in society, and he combined those two traits when he wrote the article on the water filtration system, with a very accurate prediction:

“As the country becomes more thickly populated it will be found also to be impossible to protect properly – which means absolutely – the natural sources of our water supplies.  There can be no doubt, therefore, that safety in future will lie in some man-made system of treating water to render it safe to drink.  Filtration is the answer to the problem.”  (RED CROSS MESSENGER, Vol. V, No. 10, March 1913, p. 286 “Clean Water.”)
 
* (The Underground Railroad ran from Philadelphia through New Brunswick, and the route did cross the Raritan River.  Sources don’t mention a tunnel, but instead say that the route across the Raritan was by barge.) 

Thomas Alva Edison invented and perfected many of the things that shaped modern life, such as the phonograph, an improved stock ticker, carbon microphone and commercially practical electric lighting.  But what was his connection to the early days of Johnson & Johnson?

 Fred Kilmer’s Opera House Pharmacy

Edison’s connection to the Company was through a personal relationship.  Thomas Edison was friendly with Frederick Barnett Kilmer, the Company’s scientific director.

Fred Kilmer

Before joining Johnson & Johnson, Kilmer ran the Opera House Pharmacy in downtown New Brunswick.  Along with company founder Robert Wood Johnson, Edison was a frequent visitor to Kilmer’s pharmacy.  As a fellow scientist, Edison was interested in what Fred Kilmer had to say about the science behind pharmacy, and would join Kilmer behind the counter to watch him work.  On the occasions when Mrs. Edison managed to persuade her husband to attend the opera in New Brunswick, they would make a quick stop at Dr. Kilmer’s pharmacy to make sure the inventor was presentable before heading to the event.  Aside from the more social aspects of their friendship, Thomas Edison also bought supplies from the Opera House Pharmacy that he would use in his Menlo Park laboratory.  In fact, Fred Kilmer sold Edison some of the carbon, charcoal and other materials he used in developing the first commercially practical incandescent light, thus forming a connection, albeit a very small one, between the electric light and Johnson & Johnson.