Kilmer House

Since August is vacation time, this post was inspired by a Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies employee who sent me these photos from her vacation:

Look What’s In the Smithsonian!

The photos are from her trip to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which houses, among other things, The Spirit of St. Louis, the famous airplane that aviator Charles Lindbergh used to make the first successful nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.  The flight was a big deal, because though a number of very experienced pilots had tried it, until Lindbergh (who was a talented aviator but had less experience than some of those who had failed) no one had been successful. The Spirit of St. Louis was a small lightweight single seat monoplane, so it didn’t have much room for a lot of extras on it – just food, water and absolutely essential supplies.  According to this site, in order to minimize the plane’s weight and increase fuel efficiency so that it would make it from New York to Paris, these are some of the surprising items that Lindbergh had to eliminate:  the radio, parachute, gas gauges, navigation lights and all unnecessary maps (who knew that maps could be heavy?).  But he took a lightweight Johnson & Johnson First Aid Kit with him.

Alert blog readers will notice from the photo above that Lindbergh’s Johnson & Johnson First Aid Kit is prominently displayed as part of the exhibit.  I understand that The Spirit of St. Louis display is one of the most popular in the museum.  So if anyone is headed to the National Air and Space Museum, be sure to look for the Company’s First Aid Kit that made that historic flight!  (And by the way, look at the flying gloves…they look like three-fingered mittens.)

Thanks to S. G. for the photos!

It’s strong, it’s sticky, it’s in practically every home, and it’s been used to fix almost everything — from airplane wings to houses to chair legs. It has a fanatical following, people even make clothing out of it, and there’s an annual festival and more than one website dedicated to it. What is it? It’s duct tape, and it was invented by Johnson & Johnson during World War II as a waterproof sealing tape.

Samples of  Duct Tape from Permacel Tape Reference Book in Our Archives

So why on earth did a company that made sterile dressings, sterile sutures, public health and personal care products invent a product that people use to repair lawn furniture, car mirrors and countless other things? It was a combination of the Company’s long history of making adhesive tapes for wound dressings…and the role played by U.S. companies during World War II.

ZONAS® Adhesive Plaster — an early cloth tape for wound dressings

Adhesive tape (or adhesive plaster, as it was called a very long time ago) is one of the Company’s oldest products, dating back to the late 1800s, and was an outgrowth of our sterile dressings business – doctors and surgeons needed something to keep the sterile dressings in place on the patient. And of course, adhesive tape was one of the two products (the other being gauze) that was used to invent BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages in 1920.

Johnson & Johnson had been making bandages, dressings and other products for the military since the Spanish American War in 1898 and, during World War I, the Company ran its surgical dressing production around the clock seven days a week to meet the needs of soldiers and hospitals. We continued making lifesaving medical products for the military during World War II, but as a routine part of the war effort, the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies was asked to make or develop a variety of products that weren’t part of its usual product lines.

LUMITE Plastic Screen Cloth – one of our wartime products developed to screen insects during World War II

With the absence of permanent suppliers of military products as an ongoing industry in the 1940s, and the need for quickly gearing up production, it was standard practice during World War II for U.S. companies to be asked to mobilize to make a variety of products for the war effort: among the wartime products Johnson & Johnson affiliate companies made were gas masks (we still have one in our archives!), parts for airplane landing gear, wing hinges and unwoven cotton camouflage material (from our then-affiliate The Chicopee Manufacturing Company). Given the Company’s long expertise in making adhesive tapes, the military asked Johnson & Johnson to have one of its operating companies make a waterproof, strong cloth based tape that could keep moisture out of ammunition cases.  Here’s what our 1945 Annual Report said:

“In Milltown, New Jersey, the Industrial Tape Corporation plant was one of the largest suppliers of industrial tape for the armed forces. These pressure-sensitive tapes, easy to handle and versatile in use, saved valuable time in manufacturing and packaging war materials. A wide variety of tapes to serve a multitude of particular purposes were made for the aviation industry alone. Actually hundreds of thousands of miles of special waterproof tapes were used on tanks, planes, and ammunition destined for overseas.” [Johnson & Johnson 1945 Annual Report]

Duct Taping an Airplane!  (From our 1945 Annual Report)

The tape was originally called duck tape, for its water-repelling properties. (Duck…water…get it?) And, as the story goes, the fabric used to make the tape was called cotton duck. Soldiers soon discovered that the tape was incredibly useful in repairing just about anything that needed repair, from jeeps to planes to tents to boots. As time went on, “duck” morphed into “duct” because of its use in the postwar building industry to help connect…you guessed it…ductwork for heating and air conditioning. 

How duck tape became duct tape:  two men duct taping — what else? — a duct, from a Permacel product catalog in our archives

Navy E Flag Ceremony

Johnson & Johnson received a Navy “E” Award for its work during World War II, which was an honor given to companies that made a significant contribution to the war effort… a contribution that included duct tape.  The Navy E Flag was proudly displayed at the Company’s facilities in New Brunswick, New Jersey. 

Permacel in 1970

Duct tape was originally made by an affiliate company called the Industrial Tape Corporation, which became Permacel. Its headquarters was one of the familiar “Factories Can be Beautiful” buildings in Central New Jersey. Permacel still exists, but it’s no longer part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies: we sold it in 1982.

So the next time you’re fixing that lawn chair or duct-taping the handle of your favorite household tool back together — or perhaps making a duct tape float for the annual duct tape festival parade – you can tell your friends and family that you’re using something  originally invented by Johnson & Johnson for the war effort in 1942.  And stay tuned for my next post about what people used to fix everything BEFORE duct tape…strangely enough, it also came from Johnson & Johnson.
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Click here to watch Chairman and Chief Executive Officer William C. Weldon Ring the NYSE Closing Bell

Johnson & Johnson Chairman and Chief Executive Officer William Weldon rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week (on Monday, August 3rd) to commemorate a big upcoming anniversary: our becoming a publicly traded company.  On September 24th, it will be 65 years ago that Johnson & Johnson went from a privately held company to a publicly traded one, with a listing on a famous institution that was started in the 1700s by a bunch of men meeting under a tree in New York City:  the New York Stock Exchange.

Pages 4 and 5 of 1944 Johnson & Johnson Annual Report – our first ever Annual Report

The year of the Johnson & Johnson initial public offering of stock – 1944 — was toward the end of World War II, the year in which the tide of the war had continued to turn, leading to the Allied victory the following year.  It was an election year, with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decisively winning re-election for an unprecedented fourth term against Thomas E. Dewey.   Kidney dialysis and sunscreen were invented that year, gasoline cost an average of 15 cents a gallon, and a loaf of bread was ten cents.  In the U.S., people were still growing victory gardens to help ease shortages in the public food supply due to the war effort, and popular films out that year starred Humphrey Bogart (To Have and To Have Not), Edward G. Robinson (Double Indemnity) and Judy Garland (Meet Me in St. Louis).

JOHNSON’S® Baby Lotion — Introduced in 1944

In 1944, Johnson & Johnson had 31 operating companies (compared with the more than 250 that we have today), with 17 of them outside of the U.S.  We had just launched JOHNSON’S® Baby Lotion, which came in a clear glass bottle.  Earle Dickson, the inventor of BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages, was on our board of directors as vice president in charge of the Hospital Division.  The Company was still involved in wartime production during World War II in 1944, and just two years earlier had invented a waterproof cloth tape that was requested by the military, as part of the products we produced for the war effort:  that tape, believe it or not, was duct tape.  (Yes, the duct tape, which I promise will be the subject of a future post.)

Wartime packaging — cardboard instead of the familiar tin

Oh, and by the way, our iconic BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage tins had temporarily given way to cardboard packaging to conserve metal for the war effort.  In the midst of all of this, Johnson & Johnson went public with an initial stock price of $37.50 per share.

General Robert Wood Johnson, in uniform

General Robert Wood Johnson, who had led Johnson & Johnson since 1932, had served for several months during the war in Washington, D.C. as head of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, and was back at Johnson & Johnson in 1944.  That year, he published But, General Johnson, a book about his experiences in Washington.  (The title referred to the most common phrase he had heard in response to his many ideas during his tenure as head of the SWPC.)  A year earlier, in 1943, Johnson had codified his philosophy about running a business into Our Credo, which still guides Johnson & Johnson today.

Signature of General Robert Wood Johnson

At a December 12, 1943, board of directors meeting, Johnson told the members of the board (back then our directors were all Company employees) that in 1944 Johnson & Johnson would become publicly traded.  But Johnson emphasized that the Company’s management philosophy – Our Credo — would stay exactly the same under public ownership:  our first responsibility would continue to be to patients, consumers and customers, then to employees, then the community and last, to shareholders.

So in 1944, as a publicly traded company, Johnson & Johnson had to issue – for the first time – an annual report.  Here’s the cover of our very first Annual Report.

Compared to today’s full-sized annual reports, the 1944 report was small, measuring just a little less than six by nine inches and, as befits a wartime publication, a little on the plain side.  The report contained a letter to shareholders from Robert Wood Johnson, a brief description of the Company and some of its major affiliate companies, financial information and a list of members of the Board of Directors and officers of the Company.  The publication started with a letter from chairman Robert Wood Johnson, that began “During 1944 securities of Johnson & Johnson were offered to the public for the first time since incorporation in 1887.  This is the first consolidated annual report published by the Company.”   [Johnson & Johnson Annual Report, 1944] The concisely worded letter mentioned new products introduced that year and highlighted the Company’s conservative financial management (which had allowed the Johnson & Johnson to weather economic depressions in 1893, 1907 and 1929).  Finally, Johnson closed with “I express for the Board of Directors and for myself sincere appreciation for the loyalty of the men and women of Johnson & Johnson.  Their performance was the significant factor in the development of the Company in 1944, as in all prior years.”  [Johnson & Johnson Annual Report, 1944]

Our 1944 Annual Report was succinct and spare, as befitting the year in which it was published.  By the following year, the 1945 Annual Report would expand its coverage of Johnson & Johnson, talking about the Company’s business philosophy, highlighting its products, and discussing the year more in depth, features that continue in our Annual Reports today, well over half a century later.