1. A 1927 price list that belonged to Earle Dickson, inventor of the BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage.  The pages inside have handwritten notes by Dickson and, yes, his invention is listed, on page 11.  Here’s the page that was most meaningful to Earle Dickson, with his handwriting.

2. A Zonweiss ad from 1887, the year after Johnson & Johnson was founded.  This one shows figures from Ancient Roman mythology discussing the merits of Zonweiss tooth cream, the Company’s first consumer product.

 3. Perhaps the earliest ad for JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder, from the 1890s, the decade the product was first introduced.

4. A wire mesh splint designed by Revra DePuy, the founder of our operating company DePuy, Inc.  DePuy, Inc., founded in 1895, was the world’s first-ever orthopaedics company.  Before Revra DePuy’s fitted splints, doctors used the staves from barrels, among other things, to splint broken limbs.  This one was designed for an arm.

5. A tin from Seabury & Johnson, Company founder Robert Wood Johnson’s partnership before Johnson & Johnson.

6. Two very old LISTERINE® Antiseptic bottles, circa the very early 1920s.  These bottles are small — only about four inches in height.

7. Fred Kilmer’s analytical balance, which he used in our laboratories starting in 1889.

8. The Johnson & Johnson factory whistle from 1901, when all of the Company’s operations were in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  It’s said that the whistle could be heard for miles in the towns surrounding New Brunswick.

9. The Company’s secretary and head of sales A. R. Lewis (L) and scientific director Fred Kilmer (R) getting creative by posing for a medicated plaster ad over 100 years ago.

10.  And finally, how did Johnson & Johnson employees stay cool before air conditioning was invented?  Fans!  Here’s a picture of some of our, well…biggest fans from earlier years.

Does anyone out there collect Johnson & Johnson vintage memorabilia?  We’ve shared some of the coolest items in our Company archives.  Which one do you think is the coolest?  And what cool things do you have in your collections?  Let me know!

General Robert Wood Johnson

Investor’s Business Daily just did a feature article called “Johnson & Johnson’s Big Shot” – about none other than General Robert Wood Johnson.  The article is drawn from two interviews, one with Larry Foster, the author of Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, a frequently quoted source on this blog; and one with David Morse, the head of communication for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  Larry Foster worked with General Robert Wood Johnson:  he was hired by him to start the Company’s Public Relations department.   Here’s the link to the article:  http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=543441&p=2

Robert Wood Johnson II as a teenager — about the time he started full time work at Johnson & Johnson

The feature article highlights the very different path to success taken by Robert Wood Johnson II.  The son of one of our founders, Johnson could have started at the top.  Instead, he chose to come to work full-time at Johnson & Johnson as a teenager…working side by side on the manufacturing floors with the Hungarian immigrants who at one time made up about 60 percent of our workforce in New Brunswick.  As Robert Wood Johnson worked his way up through the ranks, he developed a very different way of thinking that resulted in our philosophy of decentralized global expansion, and in the writing of Our Credo.

For blog readers who have visited Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters in New Brunswick, the former power house building in which the teenaged Robert Wood Johnson started his first full time job is still here.  Does anyone know which building it is today?

Rare early ad for Belladonna Plasters, from our archives, 1888.

We know Company founder Robert Wood Johnson as the ultimate businessman.  But he also had a hands-on scientific side that started with his training in the early 1860s as a teenaged apprentice in Wood & Tittamer, his maternal relatives’ apothecary in Poughkeepsie, New York, where Johnson first learned to make medicinal plasters.  Johnson went on to spend many hours with his sleeves rolled up, elbow-deep in pails full of ingredients, trying to improve the methods of making one of the 19th century’s most popular health care products — the medicated plaster.  In 1894, when Johnson & Johnson had been in business for eight years, Robert Wood Johnson wrote an article about what he had learned from his long experience.

Wood & Tittamer, where Company founder Robert Wood Johnson got his start in health care as a teenager. 

Before the Johnson brothers’ improvements, the issues with handmade medicated plasters were many.  The ingredients were hard to work with.  The plasters wouldn’t keep for long periods of time, and the methods of making the rubber flexible frequently rendered the medication inactive.  Writing elsewhere, Robert Wood Johnson said:  “‘Probably no other branch of the pharmaceutical art has been the occasion of so much toil, anxiety and failure and discouragement before any measure or success was met.’”  Describing the frustrations of his years of experimenting with plaster making to improve the product, Johnson went on to say, in his very polite fashion, “‘Expressive expletives could not be restrained.’”  [Robert Wood Johnson, The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999,  p. 13]

Robert Wood Johnson the first

By the time Johnson & Johnson was established, Robert Wood Johnson had solved many of these issues.  He used a different kind of rubber base and found ways to work with the properties of the ingredients, and not against them.  The machinery designed by James Wood Johnson allowed Johnson & Johnson to mass produce these products with improved efficacy, high quality and consistency.  

Some of the machinery designed by James Wood Johnson for the manufacture of medicated plasters.

Belladonna plasters in particular had led to much teeth-gritting frustration in the medical products industry, because the heat used in the manufacturing process at that time tended to render the active ingredient inactive.  The person who finally solved that problem through practical scientific experimentation was Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson.  His improvements made plasters more stable and more effective, and they were incorporated into the 16th edition of the United States Dispensatory and written up in a variety of pharmaceutical journals as a great leap ahead.  With those credentials as an expert, and a range of medicated plasters manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson wrote his 1894 article.

The article appeared in a Company publication called “Belladonna Illustrated, A Study of Its History, Action and Uses in Medicine” that brought together contributions from leading experts including doctors, scientists and academics.  Johnson’s contribution focused on the making of belladonna plasters, and it was titled (not surprisingly), “Making Belladonna Plasters.”  The article is interesting, both for Johnson’s practical scientific knowledge and his no-nonsense writing style.

Johnson began by recognizing medicated plasters as having a sound basis in science.  Let’s hear directly from Johnson in his own words:

“Plasters are such common articles of merchandise that we are apt to think of them as things that are bought and sold by the pound or yard; but, in the compounding and mixing room, problems arise that call for the same judgment and skill needed in all branches of scientific pharmacy.”  [Robert Wood Johnson, “Making Belladonna Plasters,” from Belladonna Illustrated, Johnson & Johnson, 1894, p. 34]

Then, perhaps influenced by his friend the writer Edward Page Mitchell, Johnson launched into a series of quotations from doctors, pharmacists and patients that give the reader the experience of reading dialogue.  Today, we’d probably call that something like “voice of the customer,” but to Robert Wood Johnson in 1894, it was a foundation of solid scientific evidence to back up the points he was making in his article, and it all focused back on the people who used the products and what their needs were.  In his usual plain speaking style, Johnson summed it up: “The patient will tell you that he does not put on plasters for fun, or as a substitute for clothing; he wants to get well.”  [Robert Wood Johnson, “Making Belladonna Plasters,” from Belladonna Illustrated, Johnson & Johnson, 1894, p. 34]

The article is highly technical and goes into great detail, but it’s easy to read because Johnson used plain language to describe the scientific properties of the ingredients and the technical processes he had perfected.  Robert Wood Johnson had learned the health care business through the 19th century career training path of apprenticeship, and his writing reflected that as well as his personality.  If you read the quotes in this post out loud, you can really get a sense of how Johnson spoke. 

“To make a good belladonna plaster with any kind of base, is not easy.  It was not accomplished in the ‘good old way,’ when belladonna juice or the leaf itself was ‘melted down’…”  [Robert Wood Johnson, “Making Belladonna Plasters,” from Belladonna Illustrated, Johnson & Johnson, 1894, p. 34]

“The National Dispensatory says ‘temperature 120-130 is required.’  In my experience this heat would greatly injure belladonna, would be disastrous, and good belladonna would be cremated in the mass so that it would never reach the spot where it could do any good as a curative.”  [Robert Wood Johnson, “Making Belladonna Plasters,” from Belladonna Illustrated, Johnson & Johnson, 1894, p. 34]

“Everything put into a plaster which is not an active medicinal agent, or has no use in promoting adhesion or absorption, is simply debris that will fill the pores of the skin with so much dirt, and stands in the way of the drugs being absorbed.”  [Robert Wood Johnson, “Making Belladonna Plasters,” from Belladonna Illustrated, Johnson & Johnson, 1894, p. 34]

“After all the study and experiment in putting rubber into every conceivable shape, one cannot with any certainty tell whether a certain piece of rubber will spoil quickly or not. If the plasters keep the rubber is all right; if the plasters spoil the rubber is not all right.”  [Robert Wood Johnson, “Making Belladonna Plasters,” from Belladonna Illustrated, Johnson & Johnson, 1894, p. 35]

And finally, Johnson’s no-nonsense practicality comes across in his description of the skills needed to make a successful belladonna plaster:

“The operation of mixing and spreading on cloth requires care and skill that comes only with thorough training, one must have quick hands, an eye on the thermometer and quick discernment as to when the proper plasticity is reached.  These with accurately adjusted apparatus guided by a good, clear-headed judgment are pre-eminent requisites in the spreading of a belladonna plaster.   [Robert Wood Johnson, “Making Belladonna Plasters,” from Belladonna Illustrated, Johnson & Johnson, 1894, p. 36]

Although the article in our archives that Johnson wrote was only three and a half pages long, it gives us the perfect opportunity to hear the voice of one of our founders, Robert Wood Johnson.

Robert Wood Johnson

Invisible men?  Time travel?  Teleportation?  What do those ideas have to do with Johnson & Johnson?  They sound more like science fiction – and they were.  They appeared first in short stories written in 1881 by Edward Page Mitchell, one of the earliest pioneers of science fiction who wrote what’s likely the first story ever to include a time machine, years before the classic book by H. G. Wells.  But here’s the even stranger thing:  Mitchell also wrote about Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson.  Why did he do that?  The two men were friends, and Mitchell wrote about Johnson in one of his books – not a science fiction story, but a book called Memoirs of an Editor: Fifty Years of American Journalism. 

Mitchell worked first as a reporter and later as an editor for the New York Sun, one of the leading newspapers of the late1800s.  This site has a photo of Mitchell, if anyone’s interested.  In the 1870s, when Robert Wood Johnson was living in New York and first establishing himself in the health care business, he and Mitchell became part of a circle of friends.   This circle would often meet at Pfaff’s, the famous restaurant on Broadway that was a gathering place for leading New York figures in the arts.  In the generation before Robert Wood Johnson, Pfaff’s regulars had included the poet Walt Whitman and the famous cartoonist Thomas Nast – who first drew the modern depiction of Santa Claus that became part of popular culture. 

Seabury & Johnson Iodoform Gauze Tin

In the 1870s, when Robert Wood Johnson was a partner in Seabury & Johnson, he and Mitchell took a trip to Europe together.  Mitchell was there to accompany Johnson and to see the sights, and Johnson was there to assess business conditions, talk to European retail pharmacists and look at the types of products they sold, all with an eye to growing the business of Seabury & Johnson – pre-Johnson & Johnson, of course!  Mitchell, being a writer, left a vivid eyewitness description of their trip in his memoirs…complete with the interesting fact that Robert Wood Johnson wore a tall stovepipe hat that he was very reluctant to part with!  Here’s what Mitchell said:

“ ‘When we were jointly admiring some architectural marvel or sentimentalizing at some historic site, Johnson would suddenly pull his tall silk hat more firmly upon his brow and dart away to enter the shop of a neighboring chemist or apotheker or pharmacien and talk for an hour about dry mustard plasters and elastic bandages for the wounded.  I came to love him much, and to hate his hat.  He insisted on wearing it on all occasions, formal or informal alike…’ ”  [Robert Wood Johnson, The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999, p. 30]

The Devils Bridge, Switzerland, public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

So Mitchell dared Johnson to join him in throwing their hats into the deep river gorge at a place called the Devil’s Bridge at the St. Gotthard Pass in Switzerland.  Johnson very reluctantly agreed, and they bought local replacement hats to wear.  When they arrived at the site, Mitchell threw his hat in first while Johnson struggled with the decision to part with his favorite head covering.  Here’s how Mitchell described it: 

“ ‘There was once a famous battle at that desolate, diabolical spot, but I doubt if the conflict was fiercer than that between Johnson’s pride of possession and sense of honor.  Not till I had shamed him by redeeming first my share of the vow did the cherished and detested stovepipe descend to the divvle, to be caught by the foaming Reuss torrent and whirled to the Rhine and out in to the North Sea unless intercepted.’ ”   [Robert Wood Johnson, The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999, p. 30]

Unfortunately for Mitchell, as soon as they got to Paris, Johnson went out early before breakfast one morning and bought the closest thing to his old hat that he could find – and wore it for the rest of the trip.    

Perhaps the most famous example of a stovepipe hat, Robert Wood Johnson’s favorite hat:  public domain photo of Abraham Lincoln, courtesy of Wikipedia.

If anyone’s interested in reading some of Mitchell’s stories, which were syndicated in The New York Sun, and contained invisible men and time travel a decade before H. G. Wells, you can read them here and here.  The language, setting and attitudes are very Victorian, but the ideas are wildly innovative…something that may have appealed to Mitchell’s friend Robert Wood Johnson, who was engaged in shaking up the medical products field with some pioneering innovations of his own. 

These last few posts have focused on things that were written about Company founder Robert Wood Johnson.  In my next post, we’ll have the opportunity to hear from Robert Wood Johnson himself.  How can we do that?  Stay tuned to Kilmer house to find out.

It’s 1887 and Johnson & Johnson has grown in just one year from 14 employees in one building to 125 employees in several buildings.  Our original building from 1886, the four-story former wallpaper factory, is now the plaster mill, filled with machinery designed by founder James Wood Johnson to mass produce medicated plasters.  Now, for the first time, we have an opportunity to see what it looked like inside that building. Let’s take a short walk through.

Artist’s Rendition of the First Johnson & Johnson Building from 1886

So how can we go back to 1887 and see inside our first building?  We can do that because we’re fortunate to have in our archives the second article ever written about Johnson & Johnson.  (In case you’re wondering, the first article was a single paragraph in the March 3rd, 1886 edition of The New Brunswick Times, announcing that the three Johnson brothers had rented a building and would soon start operations.)

The Second Article Written About Johnson & Johnson, from 1887

In April of 1887, a publication called The Detroit Pharmaceutical Era did an article on the manufacture of medicinal plasters (another name for medicated plasters, the popular medical product of the day).  Since the Johnson brothers changed the way in which those products were made and improved their efficacy, the article focused on how Johnson & Johnson manufactured them.

A Medicated Plaster

Medicated, or medicinal plasters delivered medicine directly through the skin.  They were made of rubber infused with a medication – commonly to generate heat or pain relief – and they were sticky on one side.  You peeled off the backing and stuck the plaster, or as big a piece of the plaster as you needed, directly over the part of the body needing the medication, and removed it when you were done. 

The Johnson & Johnson buildings in 1887.  Our first building, the former Janeway and Carpender wallpaper factory, is the building on the left.

Here’s a detailed eyewitness description of Johnson & Johnson in 1887, from the writer at The Detroit Pharmaceutical Era who came here to do the article:

“The factories of the house of Johnson & Johnson stand back from the depot of the Pennsylvania Railroad at New Brunswick, N.J. about 150 feet.  They are large and extensive, including, as they do, three handsome brick buildings and covering an area of 8,00 square feet, or about two acres of land.  In the neighborhood of 35,000 square feet of flooring are used in the manufacture of all the products of the firm…The main building, which is devoted entirely to the manufacture of the rubber plasters, is of brick and is four stories high.  In its basement is a 200-horse power engine which furnishes power for all three of the buildings.  Back of the main edifice is a smaller one, devoted exclusively to the manufacture of mustard plasters, while on its side is still another brick building five stories in height, devoted to the manufacture of the numerous other pharmaceutical preparations turned out by the house.”   [Detroit Pharmaceutical Era, “The Manufacture of Medicinal Plasters, April, 1887] 

The products made in the five story building would have included sterile surgical dressings, sterile sutures, and adhesive tapes.   If anyone’s wondering what that basement engine room might have looked like, it probably looked a lot like this:

From our archives, photo showing the Engine Room, Old Mill, from 1894.

Here’s an employee in the drying room in our first building, hanging the flattened sheets of rubber that would be used to make medicinal plasters. 

According to the article, the drying room was directly over the boiler room, and the temperature of the drying room was never allowed to fall below 100 degrees.  Despite the heat, the drying process took a full week.  Also interesting is the fact that the employees in the illustrations are depicted wearing hats.  None of our plaster mill employees from the 1800s photographed in our archives are wearing hats in the photos; perhaps the illustrator (or the employees) felt that a hat would be more formal and proper for the important occasion of being depicted in an illustration for an article in 1887.  

Here’s an illustration of the plaster mixing and spreading room in our original building.  The machinery was designed by Company founder James Wood Johnson, who was a skilled and creative engineer.  His machinery improved the methods of mass producing medicated plasters. 

Plaster Mixing and Spreading Room, 1887, from the original Johnson & Johnson building. 

Here’s another corner of our first building, with an automatic perforating machine, for the manufacture of porous plasters — like the Belladonna Plaster shown in this post.  (Porous plasters got their name from the rows of small round holes, or perforations, in them.)  Interestingly enough, James Wood Johnson didn’t invent this complex machine.  So who did?  Here’s what The Detroit Pharmaceutical Era said:  “The machine is a complicated one that works automatically, and is the invention of Mr. R. W. Johnson.” 

The Automatic Perforating Machine, in our original building

The article described the manufacturing process in detail, and the writer was clearly impressed by the number and variety of products the new company manufactured, because he took an entire paragraph to list them.  The writer wrapped up with an overall appreciation of the entire medicated plaster industry.

“In the entire output of the country fully 160,000 pounds or 80 tons of rubber is used yearly; and when it is considered how small the quantity of rubber material necessary for a single plaster of almost infinitesimal thickness, the full extent of the enormous number made yearly and the magnitude of the industry can be appreciated.”  [Detroit Pharmaceutical Era, “The Manufacture of Medicinal Plasters, April, 1887] 

Readers of Kilmer House can certainly appreciate the opportunity to see inside our first-ever 1886 building in 1887, just a year after Johnson & Johnson started, and the glimpse of some of our early innovation in improving one of the most popular health care products of almost 125 years ago.

Richard B. Sellars during his tenure as Chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson

Richard Sellars joined Johnson & Johnson 71 years ago, at the tail end of the Great Depression in 1939, as a junior salesman for the newly formed Ortho Pharmaceutical Division and 40 years later, he was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Company.  From 1941 to 1945, Sellars was president and general manager of the Canadian Ortho affiliate company, after which he helped establish the manufacturing and sales divisions for Ortho in England and Scandinavia.  In 1949 he joined Ethicon, Inc., which had just been formed out of the Company’s historic suture business that dated back to 1887; remarkably, he was chairman of the boards of both of those operating companies at the same time.  In 1950, he was elected to the Johnson & Johnson Board of Directors (General Johnson was Chairman), and he became a member of the Executive Committee in 1957.  In 1970 he was named president of Johnson & Johnson International, the organization that oversaw the Company’s international affiliates at that time.

Mr. Sellars was a member of management when General Robert Wood Johnson wrote Our Credo in 1943, and he was a strong believer in Johnson’s ideas about the social responsibilities of business as outlined in that document, especially as they related to the Company’s responsibilities to the community.   

Richard Sellars talks with then-National Urban League executive director Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. at the 1973 National Urban League Conference

When Philip Hofmann became Chairman in 1963 – succeeding General Robert Wood Johnson – Mr. Sellars was named President and Chairman of the Executive Committee.  When Philip Hofmann retired in 1973, Richard Sellars succeeded him as Chairman.

Mr. Sellars in 1962

In the decades following World War II, New Brunswick – the Company’s home since 1886 – had suffered a visible economic decline.  Discussions had begun among members of the Company’s management about relocating the Johnson & Johnson corporate headquarters outside of the city.  Mr. Sellars, citing the third paragraph of Our Credo, which talks about responsibility to the community, guided our board of directors to make the decision to remain in New Brunswick, build a brand new world headquarters building here, and help revitalize the city. 

Richard Sellars (left), Former New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne (center) and former Johnson & Johnson Chairman and CEO James E. Burke (right) inspect a model of the Company’s proposed World Headquarters at a 1978 press conference announcing its construction. 

Here’s what Richard Sellars said about that decision, as quoted in Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel:

“‘I looked at the Credo’s commitment to the communities where we work and live…and I reminded myself of General Johnson’s deep sense of loyalty to New Brunswick, his birthplace.  Those two factors influenced the decision to remain in New Brunswick, but I also knew that we would have to work to revitalize the city to make it worth staying here.’”  [Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999, p. 614]

Among his other activities after he retired, Mr. Sellars led the revitalization effort for ten years, putting together local business, university, hospital and civic leaders to form New Brunswick Tomorrow, the organization that led and continues to be a leader in the revitalization.  This partnership between all of the various public and private groups in New Brunswick initiated by Richard Sellars came to be held up as a national model for successful revitalization in other cities.  The centerpiece of the effort was a new world headquarters for Johnson & Johnson designed by the internationally renowned architectural firm of I. M. Pei. 

Mr. Sellars at the 1976 Johnson & Johnson Annual Meeting, greeting a shareholder

Because of Mr. Sellars’ foresight, Johnson & Johnson employees in New Brunswick can still literally walk in the footsteps of their colleagues from 1886, and Johnson & Johnson remains an integral part of the city in which it was founded by three brothers over a century ago.

Illustration of Johnson & Johnson from an April, 1887 article in the Detroit Pharmaceutical Era, from our archives.  Our first building is on the left.

Johnson & Johnson opened its doors in 1886 with fourteen employees.  By 1887, that number had grown to 125, and the Company had expanded from the original four-story former wallpaper factory building into several surrounding buildings, overseen by James Wood Johnson, who was in charge of manufacturing.  We also had a sales office managed by Edward Mead Johnson in downtown Manhattan. (It was at 32 Cedar Street, in case anyone’s curious.) 

Robert Wood Johnson

Company founder Robert Wood Johnson initially spent a lot of his time in the New York office, notifying his many friends and acquaintances in the medical products field that he had joined Johnson & Johnson, and helping get the new business off the ground.  In 1887, Robert began spending more and more time in New Brunswick.  The original fourteen employees knew him from Seabury & Johnson, but the newer employees, used to the quieter and more laid back style of James Wood Johnson, were initially in awe of Robert Wood Johnson, who created a flurry of energy and activity wherever he went.  Their first impression of R.W. – as he was known – was that he was authoritative, opinionated and had a quick temper, but once they got to know him, they liked what they saw.  Johnson had the ability to rally and inspire his employees and get them excited about the work they were engaged in – making products that would help save patients’ lives.  “’He injects his enthusiasm, his grit and his faith into everyone else, and when ‘R.W.’ says ‘It’s a go!’ we push forward with all of our strength,’” said Fred Kilmer, who ended up so inspired by Johnson that he sold his business and came to work for the Company.  [Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999 p. 69] 

One of the Company’s early benefits:  subsidized employee housing on Morell Street in New Brunswick

Johnson enacted a wide range of benefits for employees that made them fiercely loyal to the new company.  When R.W. wasn’t at Johnson & Johnson, he was walking downtown to talk to the local merchants about business.  He also stopped into the New Brunswick pharmacies to make sure they carried Johnson & Johnson products.  One of those pharmacies was Fred Kilmer’s Opera House Pharmacy, right down the street from Johnson & Johnson, and he and Kilmer struck up a friendship that led to Kilmer joining Johnson & Johnson as our scientific director in 1889. 

Fred Kilmer’s Opera House Pharmacy

Kilmer was a gifted writer, and he left some vivid eyewitness descriptions of his friend and employer.  Here’s one of Kilmer’s descriptions of Company founder Robert Wood Johnson that paints a picture of what Johnson was like:  Kilmer described Johnson as tall and stout, with dark hair and eyes, and a forceful, outgoing personality.  “‘If you see him you will always remember a peculiar roll of the head which accompanies his laughter and his arguments.  It is performed by dropping the chin, and ascribing there a small circle, of which the spine is the center.  It is a family roll.  He has it and all of his brothers have it…If you get into an argument with him, he will soon utter some dogmatic statement with a determined air and branch off into something else, as if he had settled the subject.  While he is undecided he is willing to listen, but when his course is once settled, I would not care for the job of turning him in another direction.’”  [Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999, p. 69] 

Johnson & Johnson office in 1895, with R. W. Johnson in the window looking out at the main office.

Robert Wood Johnson involved himself in every facet of the new business.  He opened the Company’s mail every morning.  He would gather a few of his managers in a room, and when the sacks of mail were brought in, they opened all of it, sorted it and responded personally to customer orders, inquiries and suggestions.  Johnson had a very good memory, and could rattle off detailed up to the minute sales figures.  He could tell you which products sold in which markets and how much they sold, how much inventory the Company had and how much could be produced and shipped in any time period, and he could recite a wide variety of economic information about the various countries in which we sold our products.   

Another facet of the business Johnson involved himself in was advertising.  Johnson & Johnson worked with a young advertiser who had bought a small agency for $500 and renamed it after himself:  J. Walter Thompson.  He and Robert Wood Johnson had been friends for several years, and Thompson personally handled the Johnson & Johnson account.  Johnson didn’t hesitate to write to Thompson with minutely detailed constructive suggestions about how to improve his ads.  (A trait his son, the future General Robert Wood Johnson, would inherit.)  Here’s an example:  “‘I return the sketch and hardly see how you can make an advertisement out of it.  It needs to have a very black background in order to throw out the white letters.’”  [Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999 p. 51]  (If anyone’s interested, here’s an ad campaign that Thompson worked on for us in 1910.)

Grey Terrace, Robert Wood Johnson’s New Brunswick, New Jersey House

As Kilmer House readers may know, Robert Wood Johnson lived in a big house on the corner of Hamilton Street and Easton Avenue in New Brunswick.  Every afternoon, he walked home to have lunch with his wife and three young children, relaxed for a bit in his library, and then he walked back to Johnson & Johnson to resume his business day.

The site of Grey Terrace today — a Rutgers University parking lot.  Although you can’t have lunch with Robert Wood Johnson the first, you CAN buy lunch from the Rutgers University food trucks that park on the site of Johnson’s former house.  The stone wall and short wrought iron fence that surrounded the house and property are all that remain.

One hundred years later, there are still traces of Company founder Robert Wood Johnson here in the traditions that he started:  disaster relief, support for our employees who serve in the military, and a wide range of employee benefits, not to mention three out of the four pillars of the Company’s operating model:  our broad base in human health (if there was a need in society for particular products to save lives or help people, Johnson saw to it that we developed or made those products), management for the long term and the Company’s value system that would see its full expression in Our Credo, written in 1943 by Johnson’s son.

Here are some quotes from Robert Wood Johnson the first:

“The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his courage.”

“Hire men, buy machinery and keep the wheels moving and everybody busy.”  

“We are all fortunate, in that we are engaged in manufacturing products to be used throughout the world for the relief of pain and suffering.”

And, of course, when he liked an idea and wanted to move forward with it: “It’s a go!”

A Design Classic!

1.  What do BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages have in common with the @ symbol on your computer keyboard?  They’re both part of the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Here’s the link to the BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage entry on the MOMA design collection website.  (By the way, because the product is in the collection of an art museum, Earle Dickson, the inventor of BAND-AID®, is listed as the artist on the site!)

2.  There was a fourth Johnson in the early days of Johnson & Johnson!  William Johnson, a relative of Company founders Robert Wood Johnson, James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson, was listed as being in charge of the Company’s facilities in Highland Park, New Jersey – right across the river from New Brunswick.  Here’s a photo from our archives of one of the Highland Park buildings he managed:

The Old Suspensory Mill in Highland Park, New Jersey

3.  Decades ago, we built a plant in Texas that was completely underground.  Here’s a photo.

Strange But True:  We Have an Underground Plant

4.  Two very popular consumer products from the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies started out as surgical products.  Can you name them?  LISTERINE® Antiseptic and the K-Y® Brand of products.  LISTERINE® was first formulated in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic, and the K-Y® Brand — originally including an analgesic (K-Y® Analgesic) and a surgical lubricant (K-Y® Lubricating Jelly).  What else do they have in common?  They both joined the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies as part of an acquisition:  LISTERINE® was part of the acquisition of Pfizer Consumer Healthcare in 2006, and K-Y® was part of our acquisition of a small company called Van Horn & Sawtell in 1917.  Van Horn & Sawtell made sutures and other surgical products.

Early LISTERINE® Bottles and K-Y® Analgesic

5.  We once had a building in New Brunswick that had stained glass windows representing the different departments in Johnson & Johnson.  The windows were created especially for the Company, and each window pictured a different employee selected to represent his or her department.

6.  Johnson & Johnson has something in common with the Empire State Building and the Louvre. And that would be…architects.  In the 1930s, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architectural firm that had just finished building the world’s tallest building when it was completed in 1934 – the Empire State Building, was hired to build the one-story Personal Products Company plant in Central New Jersey.   So what about the Louvre?  I.M. Pei, the architect who built the modern glass and steel entrance to the Louvre, also designed and built our World Headquarters in New Brunswick, and the headquarters of our Consumer operating company, also in New Jersey.

Charles Heber Clark:  Board Member and Humorist

7.  In the early days of Johnson & Johnson, a member of our Board of Directors was ranked alongside Mark Twain as a writer and humorist, and he even may have inspired Twain to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.   That Board member was Charles Heber Clark, who wrote under the pen name Max Adeler.

Joyce Kilmer: Poet, Author, Soldier…and writer for Johnson & Johnson

8.   And while we’re on the topic of writers, Joyce Kilmer, the famed World War I poet and son of Company scientific director Fred Kilmer, wrote articles for some early Johnson & Johnson publications.  It would have been hard for him to refuse…his father was the editor!

Dr. Grosvenor’s Bellcapsic Plaster:  if the package looks like a cigar box, that’s because it was originally a cigar box!

9.  The Johnson brothers were very resourceful when it came to packaging the Company’s early products.  In our early days, Johnson & Johnson bought cigar boxes from the local cigar box manufacturer in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to use as packaging for some of our medicated plasters.

And if observant blog readers have noticed that these jars look like fruit jars, they would be absolutely correct!  There was also a fruit jar manufacturer in New Brunswick, and we bought jars from them to package some of our sterile dressings.  Why?  Because the jars could be hermetically sealed to keep the dressings sterile.  Besides reinventing existing packaging over 100 years ago, we also were one of the very first to use a strange new packaging innovation from another local manufacturer that’s now a standard — collapsible tubes.  Here’s JOHNSON’S® Shaving Cream Soap in a collapsible tube.

One of the historic LISTERINE® ads used in the documentary

This is a little different from the topics I usually post about, but my colleagues at our consumer operating company recently did a really cool documentary about LISTERINE® Antiseptic, and they asked me to be in it to talk about some of the early history of the product.  Actor Neil Patrick Harris is the narrator, and if you go to the This is Your Mouth site to watch it (which is why I’m not embedding the video here!), not only will you get to hear a certain blogger, but – more important – our operating company that makes LISTERINE® will donate $1.00 to America’s Toothfairy®, a national U.S. non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating pediatric dental disease (the leading chronic childhood illness), and making sure children receive comprehensive oral health care.  Johnson & Johnson has been a promoter of oral health for almost 125 years (our very first price list included an oral health product– a tooth cream).  So please go to this link to watch the video:

Here’s the link:  http://www.thisisyourmouth.com/

With Mother’s Day coming up in the U.S. on May 9th, Kilmer House would like to salute all of the Moms throughout our history and in our present.  This is the first in a series of three Mother’s Day posts that talk about some of our history that is connected to mothers.  One of the ways Johnson & Johnson supported mothers starting in the 1890s was through the manufacture of maternity kits, designed to insure safe childbirth for the mother and baby.

Today, there are countless books, websites, online communities and classes for expectant parents to prepare them for the birth of a child.  And in most areas of the world, childbirth occurs in a hospital with teams of trained medical professionals to ensure that the experience is routine and successful for the mother and the baby.  A hundred and twenty years ago, the experience of childbirth was very different.

In those days, most babies were born at home.  In the year 1900, only five percent of women gave birth in hospitals. The doctor or midwife — but more usually the expectant mother and the family – were expected to gather and provide any supplies that were needed for the event.  This was a practice that Johnson & Johnson was determined to change because, as our First Aid Manual stated, “The patient does not always know what is required for the maintenance of surgical cleanliness, and this is particularly true of young women, pregnant for the first time…”  [A Handbook of First Aid, Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A., 1903, p. 29]

Mother and children, 1917, from our archives

There was very little information for expectant parents, and they usually got it from family members of members of the community.  Needless to say, much of that information was unscientific and inexact.  Even more worrisome was the high incidence of what used to be called “childbed fever”– infection caused by the same germs that caused surgical infections.

So how does that tie in with Johnson & Johnson?  The founders of Johnson & Johnson (although they were fathers, not mothers) had families, and the Company had many women employees, so they were all very aware of the need for products that specifically addressed improving the health of new mothers.  So in the 1890s, working with prominent obstetricians, Johnson & Johnson came out with maternity kits.  These were large kits containing professional sterile medical supplies and antiseptic soaps — everything a doctor would need to ensure a safe and healthy birth for a mother and child.  The kits – Dr. Simpson’s Maternity Packet and, later, Dr. Cooke’s Maternity Outfit, were named after the doctors who worked with Johnson & Johnson on the kits.  Dr. Cooke was especially well-respected:  he was a professor of obstetrics and an obstetric surgeon in New York, and the author of many articles and books in his field.   The Johnson & Johnson maternity kits could be purchased either through retail drug stores or surgical supply dealers.

Dr. Simpson’s Maternity Packet

Dr. Simpson’s Maternity Packet contained a disposable obstetric sheet, sterile cotton sheeting, sealed aseptic gauze, sterile ligatures, and sponges, a small package of antiseptic JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder, petroleum jelly, antiseptic surgeon’s soap for sterilizing the doctor’s hands, instruments and anything else that needed to be germ free, a washcloth, materials for washing the infant’s eyes, a package of safety pins and a chart for use in keeping birth records.

Illustration of Dr. Cooke’s Maternity Packet

Dr. Cooke’s packet was even larger.  In addition to greater quantities of the antiseptic supplies in Dr. Simpson’s kit, Dr. Cooke’s kit also contained  24 sanitary pads (women soon began writing to Johnson & Johnson asking for them as a separate product, giving us one of our oldest consumer businesses), a nail brush (for the doctor to use in scrubbing his hands), alcohol, Synol Soap (a disinfectant soap), olive oil, boric acid solution for cleaning the infant’s eyes, sterile surgical tape, and antiseptic tablets used to make solutions to sterilize instruments.   These kits were welcomed by obstetricians, druggists and parents, to the extent that druggists advertised that they carried them to get traffic into their pharmacies.

An idea for a drugstore window sign by a retail druggist in Madison Wisconsin, submitted to THE RED CROSS MESSENGER in 1920.  Note that fathers-to-be were listed as having responsibility for gathering supplies for childbirth.

In 1902, Johnson & Johnson also published “Hygiene in Maternity,” a booklet for expectant mothers covering all aspects of pregnancy, diet, delivery and how to care for a newborn baby.  The booklets were small in size so that women could carry them in a pocket or purse, and they provided real health information to expectant mothers, instead of the traditional combination of urban legends, folk remedies and proverbs that expectant and new mothers had to navigate 100 years ago.  

Today, we talk about putting science in the service of the people who use our many products.  These maternity kits and the information booklets did exactly that over 100 years ago, and greatly helped women who were becoming mothers.