Kilmer House

What was the most unusual job in Johnson & Johnson history?  Was it digging this tunnel?  Working a gigantic printing press? Running a huge water filtration system? Making Mosquitoons? Or quality testing our short-lived cola tonic with the sherry base?

How about…glassblower.

Huh?  We employed a glassblower? Well, actually…according to our records, we employed nine glassblowers.  And it had to do with the Company’s manufacture of sterile sutures and ligatures for surgery.

These are some of the sterile sutures and ligatures made by Johnson & Johnson almost 100 years ago, packaged in glass tubes…made by Company glassblowers.

At the time, Johnson & Johnson wasn’t just the largest producer of sterile surgical dressings in the world, it was also the largest manufacturer of catgut ligatures in the world, producing an astounding 10 million feet per year.  A retail druggist visiting Johnson & Johnson in 1917 toured the Company’s ligature laboratory, which operated under the strictest antiseptic conditions.   He watched the raw materials being cleaned and sterilized (employees in the department explained to him that full cleaning took about a week) and chromicized, which was the process of waterproofing the catgut so that it wouldn’t be absorbed by the body for a set period of time.

To insure the quality of its ligatures — because the lives of surgical patients depended on them — the Company performed every step of the manufacturing process with minute detail.  The druggist commented “…I noticed that no detail is so slight that it can be neglected in the Johnson & Johnson laboratories.”  [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, January 1917, Vol IX, No. 4, p. 107]

Ligatures Being Dried

After the chromicizing process, the raw material was twisted into strands by machine and then dried, after which the strands were smoothed and polished.  They were sorted by size and then tested for strength, which was important because it insured consistency – that each container of sutures or ligatures was exactly the same quality as all of the others.

“When the surgeon gets a strand of Johnson & Johnson catgut he knows exactly the pulling it will stand before it snaps.  The smallest strand, twelve-thousandths of an inch, will stand five pounds, and the largest, thirty-six thousandths of an inch, will stand fifty pounds.  They have to come up to that standard or they are rejected.”  [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, January 1917, Vol IX, No. 4, p. 108]

The ligatures were then cut into various lengths and sterilized again.  Here’s where the glassblowers came in.  Let’s quote our druggist again:

“In the meantime the glassblowers are busy in a nearby department.  These skillful men are blowing and shaping glass containers.  Under the influence of their deft fingers glass assumes many fanciful shapes.  It takes nine of them to keep up with the demand, and they turn out many thousands a day.”  [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, January 1917, Vol IX, No. 4, p. 109]

The Catgut Sterilization Room, 1917

When the ligatures came out of the sterilizer, they were placed in the glass containers by workers wearing sterilized rubber tips on their fingers, and working on glass-topped  tables – because the glass could be kept germ-free.  The tubes were corked and sent back to the glassblowers, who sealed them.  The sealed package was sterilized yet another time and was then considered “ready for the surgeon.”

When each batch of ligatures was finished, a sample package was chosen at random, opened and tested by scientists in the Company’s bacteriological laboratory.  Here’s the description of the testing given by the visiting druggist:

“The chemists open a package from each lot, using the same precautions in handling it as should be taken in a hospital.  They remove the ligature strand with sterile forceps, and then conduct a check-test to determine if the sample is sterile.  These tests run into the many thousands and are the most perfect known means to check the efficiency of the sterilization process.  The chemist not only puts a label on the batch of strands from which he has tested samples, certifying that they are sterile, but he must sign his report in the record book.  Johnson & Johnson intend that ligatures shall reach the surgeon in a perfect condition and surgeons have told me that they do. [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, January 1917, Vol IX, No. 4, p. 109]

After taking such painstaking care to make sure that every ligature was sterile, uniform and trustworthy, the Company wasn’t about to leave the packaging to chance.  It had to be done to the same exacting specifications….which is why we had such an unusual job as glassblower at Johnson & Johnson almost 100 years ago.

Sterile Suture or Ligature package — Made by Johnson & Johnson Glassblowers

Robert Wood Johnson

A recent post talked about Robert Wood Johnson and Johnson & Johnson being at the forefront of the debate about the need for higher wages and reduced hours to increase consumer spending and get the unemployed back to work during the Great Depression.  (In case you haven’t read that post, Robert Wood Johnson advocated for higher wages and shorter hours than the New Deal proposals were suggesting.)  Johnson implemented his ideas at Johnson & Johnson and, when his ideas worked, he tried in vain to interest the Roosevelt administration and other industrialists.  His frustration at the lack of response caused him to sit down late one night at his home in Princeton, New Jersey and put his thoughts on paper.  (He preferred using lined yellow pads of paper, in case anyone’s interested.)  But instead of just filing away what he wrote, he published it in 1935 as a nine-page pamphlet called Try Reality: A Discussion of Hours, Wages and The Industrial Future.

Try Reality was written from Johnson’s heart and his personal beliefs.  He sent a copy to every major industrialist in the nation, hoping for a meaningful response, and was met with…silence.  Meanwhile, Try Reality was getting widespread praise in the press because of Johnson’s progressive — and unusual for the time — ideas about corporate social responsibility.

In 1935 American industry was struggling for survival.  Although the New Deal legislation was moving forward, the Great Depression was still in full force. Many businesses were folding, increasing the already catastrophic unemployment.  Other companies were pulling back, closing operations, shedding workers and concentrating on doing only what they felt was necessary to survive.  In Europe and in the U.S., the economic dislocation gave rise to demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and Huey Long who played on people’s fear and emotions and proposed radical solutions to the problems of the Depression.

It was in this atmosphere that Robert Wood Johnson spoke out about his belief that business had certain responsibilities toward society that went above and beyond just making a profit.

…“Private industry must solve this problem of poverty amid plenty if it wishes to remain private industry.  The people simply will not stand for a continuation of present conditions.  They demand and deserve a solution.”  [Try Reality: A Discussion of Hours, Wages and The Industrial Future, by Robert Wood Johnson, 1935.]

The italics in the paragraph above were Robert Wood Johnson’s.  He felt that this point was of supreme importance, and italicized it to make it stand out.  Most of Try Reality was about wages and hours, and set out Johnson’s familiar argument that the New Deal proposals for a minimum wage and a 40-hour work week (which most other industrialists were fighting tooth and nail) didn’t go far enough if they wanted to reduce unemployment and spur spending.  In the first section, called “Facing the Facts,” he wrote:

“The hours of employment and the problem of unemployment are two faces of the same medal.  They cannot be considered separately.  To do so ignores reality.”

At the end of the pamphlet was a section that Johnson titled “An Industrial Philosophy.”

“Out of the suffering of the past few years has been born a public knowledge and conviction that industry only has the right to succeed where it performs a real economic service and is a true social asset.

“Such permanent success is possible only through the application of an industrial philosophy of enlightened self-interest.  It is to the enlightened self-interest of modern industry to realize that its service to its customers comes first, its service to its employees and management second, and its service to its stockholders last.  It is to the enlightened self-interest of industry to accept and fulfill its full share of social responsibility.”

[Try Reality: A Discussion of Hours, Wages and The Industrial Future, by Robert Wood Johnson, 1935.]

This was the initial seed of what would become Our Credo. Johnson would think about and expand on these ideas over and over again – adding responsibility to the community, among other things – in the coming years before they found final expression in Our Credo in 1943.  Robert Wood Johnson would probably have found it interesting that, in light of recent events, many business schools are now looking for ways to increase their emphasis on the kinds of social responsibilities that he advocated and put into practice at Johnson & Johnson.

In celebration of Women’s History Month this March, Kilmer House salutes all of the women of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies worldwide, from 1886 to the present.  Here are some facts about women in the early history of Johnson & Johnson:

1.  Half of the Company’s first 14 employees in 1886 were women.

2.  Johnson & Johnson pioneered many products in women’s health, including the first sanitary protection products in the late 1800s.  Here and here are some posts about how we advertised them at a time when you couldn’t mention sanitary protection in polite society!

3.  We also made maternal and child health kits to assist in safe childbirth at a time when most babies were born at home instead of in hospitals.   Here’s one of our maternal and child health kits from the 1890s.

Dr. Simpson’s Maternity Kit, 1890s

4.  In 1908, eight out of 36 department supervisors at Johnson & Johnson were women.  Women supervised many of the departments that were central to the Company’s business, such as the Aseptic Department (which oversaw the production of sterile surgical products), the Cotton Mill’s Finishing Department, the Sanitary Napkin and Plaster Finishing Departments, the Jar Finishing Department (many of our aseptic products were packaged in jars) and more.

5.  The Company’s tradition of employee volunteerism in the community started with women employees in the Laurel Club (an employee organization) 100 years ago.

6.  In 1908 the Johnson & Johnson Scientific Department had four scientists on staff.  One of them was a college educated female scientist.

7.  In the 1950s, DePuy (which became part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies in 1998) had a female president, Mrs. Amrette Hoopes.  Here’s an article about her.

8.  We used to have a women’s basketball team!  Here’s a picture of them in 1907:

9.  One of the most successful advertising campaigns in Johnson & Johnson history featured the work of a prominent female artist, Gladys Rockmore Davis.

One of the Gladys Rockmore Davis paintings from one of our ads

10. During World War I, one of the women employees in the Advertising Department served as a chief nurse in the American expeditionary forces Army Nurse Corps in Siberia, becoming Chief Nurse of the evacuation hospital in Vladivistok, Russia. Though she worked in advertising at Johnson & Johnson, her background was in nursing, and she was one of the first to answer the call in 1917 when the American Red Cross put out an appeal for nurses.   Here’s a postcard she sent back to Johnson & Johnson from Siberia.

Here are some photographs of women throughout Johnson & Johnson history:

Women employees in the Aseptic Department in the earliest days of Johnson & Johnson

Some of the women who worked in the surgical suture plant in Australia in 1934

One of the employees at our former Eastern Surgical Dressings Plant in 1970

A Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies sales representative in Malaysia in 1971