Kilmer House

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.

Revra DePuy 

Did you know that oldest orthopaedics company in the world started in a small room in an Indiana hotel?  That company is DePuy, Inc. (part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies since 1998) and it’s named after its founder, a man named Revra DePuy.   Revra DePuy was born in 1860 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  His family moved to Canada shortly after his birth and later returned to the U.S. when his father died, settling in Illinois.  According to the DePuy family thread on Rootsweb, the family saw some hard times during this period.  Revra DePuy worked as a clerk in a drug store (as did Robert Wood Johnson the first) and the work interested him enough to cause him to take a course in chemistry at the University of Toronto in Canada, where he got his degree.  After graduation, DePuy got a job as a traveling salesman. 

According to the Warsaw Daily Times of October 10, 1921, referenced here, Revra DePuy was also a chemist during his early career, and is credited with inventing the formula for sugar coating pills. 

In the late 1800s, splints for broken limbs were distinctly unscientific, and were made out of barrel staves or other similar makeshift materials.  DePuy saw that there was a huge need for something better to help heal broken limbs, and he got the idea to start a business to produce specifically-designed splints that could be customized to fit patients, rather than the improvised splints that were commonly used.  DePuy decided to open his business in Warsaw, Indiana (where its headquarters remains today) after visiting the town as part of his job as a traveling salesman. 

The Hotel Hays, Headquarters of Revra DePuy’s New Company from 1895-1901

Here’s the link to the above photo, which is also reproduced here, courtesy of the City of Warsaw, IN and warsawcity.net.

Revra DePuy settled in, married the daughter of the local sheriff, and started building his new business.  The first DePuy plant was at the corner of Columbia and Center streets in Warsaw, and the company made specially constructed splints using fiber and wire.  Revra DePuy’s company, then called DePuy Manufacturing, was the first commercial orthopaedics manufacturer in the world.  [Update:  DePuy Manufacturing, later DePuy, Inc., was founded in 1895.]

Interestingly enough, in 1905 DePuy hired a man named Justin Zimmer as his first sales representative.  Six years after Revra DePuy died, in 1927, Zimmer left the company now run by DePuy’s widow to start his own orthopaedics company.

Revra DePuy died in 1921.  The business he started revolutionized the way orthopaedic injuries and conditions were treated.  Not only did DePuy, Inc. manufacture the first state-of-the-art splints in the 19th century, the company almost 100 years later pioneered the first hip and knee joint replacement implants.  

A thread on Rootsweb quotes an unattributed obituary for Revra DePuy, which gives a small sense of what DePuy was like as a person: 

“Revra Depuy, who has manufactured wire splints for 25 years, was one of Warsaw’s substantial businessmen and his advice was frequently sought in a business way. He was a well-educated, self-made man and had a knowledge of nearly every subject far beyond the average.  He was generous and courteous and had many warm personal friends among those who knew him well.”

Here’s another interesting bit of information about DePuy, Inc.:  in the 1950s, long before female chief executives were common, DePuy had a female president, Mrs. Amrette Hoopes.  Here’s an article about her, with pictures.

My colleagues Marc and Lori recently posted about Camp Baby, a recent event in which the Company invited over 50 women who are mom bloggers to New Brunswick.  The purpose of the event was for them to get to know Johnson & Johnson a little bit better, and for us folks at Johnson & Johnson to get to know the bloggers a little bit better.  One of the most interesting things about Camp Baby from the perspective of this blog is that it’s the kind of direct conversation with the public that Johnson & Johnson used to have around 100 years ago. 

Here’s an example of Johnson & Johnson doing just that in 1916…bringing a retail druggist who sold our products in for a visit.  And the druggist wrote about his experiences in a publication geared to other retail druggists.

Our former chairman General Robert Wood Johnson (1893 – 1968), who grew up watching his father, his uncle and Scientific Director Fred Kilmer communicate directly with the community, was a believer in keeping up a direct dialogue.  In the 1940s, he gave a series of talks about various aspects of business to Company employees, which were later compiled into a book called Robert Johnson Talks It Over.  He mentioned the various things the Company was doing in the 1940s to talk to people, such as sending speakers to community organizations, inviting groups of people to Johnson & Johnson (like we did with Camp Baby), giving students and others the chance to see what it would be like to work at Johnson & Johnson, publishing articles about the Company, and encouraging employees to talk to their friends and neighbors and answer any questions they might have.  Here’s what he said about businesses and people:

“Business Is People.” 

He went on to explain: 

“Suppose you had to answer the question, What is Business?  Would you say it is buildings, machinery, or goods to be bought and sold?  Would you call it equipment that performs service…?…A corporation is just a name and a legal formula on a piece of paper.  It is useful and even important, but it doesn’t get ideas for machines.  People have to do that, and they also must turn those ideas into equipment which still other people will use.”  [Robert Johnson Talks It Over, Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, NJ, 1949, p. 10]

“For the present, our interest lies in the fact that our companies operate because men and women – people – do their jobs and do them together, using materials and equipment provided by other men and women.  As a team, they turn mere things into going concerns.  That’s still another way of saying that our business – all business – is people…”  [Robert Johnson Talks it Over, p. 13]

Throughout its history, Johnson & Johnson (or, I should say, the people at Johnson & Johnson) liked to hear from the patients and customers who used our products.  In fact, that’s how we got into the baby products business and how we made the first-ever First Aid kits in the first place. 

Robert Wood Johnson felt that as citizens of their communities, businesses should have the understanding of their fellow citizens, and vice versa.  He wrote:  “Good community relations for business are just good neighborly relations on a large scale.”  [Robert Johnson Talks It Over, p. 80.]   At Camp Baby, we got to know some of our neighbors a little bit better.