Kilmer House

Regular readers of Kilmer House have read about the aseptic, or sterile conditions that Johnson & Johnson maintained over 100 years ago in order to manufacture the first mass produced sterile surgical dressings and sterile sutures.  So I thought it would be interesting to post some of the rules for our Aseptic Department from 1897:  112 years ago.

You Can’t Do That!  A list of what not to do from 1897

Don’t allow a dressing to touch your person or clothing, unprepared tables, tools or apparatus.
Don’t touch any other person.
Don’t touch a dressing with hands that are not surgically clean.
Don’t, while handling dressings, touch your hands to your clothing, face, hair, eyes or mouth.
Don’t allow perspiration to drop on tables or dressings [Remember, this was before air conditioning!]
Don’t cough or sneeze over the dressings or tables.
Don’t carry or use a pocket handkerchief.
Don’t put anything in your mouth.
Don’t wear flowers, ornaments, jewelry or rings. [In case you’re wondering about this rule, many or most of the Aseptic Department employees were women.]
Don’t pick up any dressing or thing that has fallen to the floor.
Don’t use anything that has fallen to the floor without sterilizing it.
Don’t fail to have everything surgically clean before you use it.
Don’t touch anything that has not been made sterile without rewashing the hands.
Don’t be afraid to wash your hands often; they will not wash away.
Don’t allow persons who have not prepared themselves to touch a dressing or anything used in their preparation.
Don’t go out of the room and come back again without as thoroughly rewashing as when you first entered.
Don’t be afraid to be particular about everything you do or touch.
Don’t handle anything when it is not necessary to do so. 

[Aseptic Dressings, Rules and Suggestions, Johnson & Johnson, late 1800s]

The Aseptic Department in 1903.  Many of the employees in this most crucial and exacting department were women.  In 1908, this included Nora H——, the Aseptic Department supervisor.

One of the Sterilizers, 1897

Here’s a 1908 description of the Company’s aseptic manufacturing facilities.  The antiseptic laboratory contained a steam sterilizer, a sterilization method pioneered by Johnson & Johnson.   It was connected with the aseptic finishing room which, according to scientific director Fred Kilmer (who oversaw the creation of these rooms) was “…the outcome of years of study in the preparation of surgical material.”  [RED CROSS NOTES, Series VI, No. 6, New Brunswick, NJ  1908, p. 127]  Plate glass (which could easily be kept germ free) formed the partitions for this room.  The floor was made from hard wood, and the walls and woodwork were covered in smooth white enamel, as was the metal ceiling.  The tables were enameled metal with glass tops so they could be disinfected. 

A corner of the Aseptic Department – you can see the glass topped enamel table

Here’s a further description:

“The walls and ceiling are glass smooth.  The floors are filled and polished.  There are no closets or shelving, no cracks or crevices to harbor dust or dirt.  The furniture consists of glass-topped tables on iron frames, which allow effectual and easy cleaning.  Everything, whatsoever may be its nature or history, outside of this room, is considered as infected (though in fact it may be free from germ life); it is, therefore, disinfected before being taken into the room.  The entrance to this room is through an anteroom, which is a disinfecting station of the highest type.  Through this quarantine all persons and things pass before entering the aseptic room.  The inanimate objects pass through the sterilizer elsewhere described.  The operatives undergo a vigorous personal cleansing and change of clothing.”  [Asepsis Secundum Artem, Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, NJ, 1897, pp. 6-7] 

“Materials pass in and out of this room through a locking system that at once keeps out all dust and infection.  The air of the room is filtered through cotton under pressure.  Thus there is formed a perfect protective against dust and infection from without.  The room is without apparatus or furniture, except for the necessary bowls for hand washing and for the care of washable uniforms, and white glass tables resting on enameled iron…”  [RED CROSS NOTES, Series VI, No. 6, New Brunswick, NJ  1908, p. 127] 

Aseptic Department Sinks

Aseptic Department employees had to wash their hands, arms and faces with antibacterial soap, and change into sterilized uniforms and caps before starting work.  Employees from other departments and messengers were not allowed into the aseptic room, and visitors were only admitted by special permission of the office (which meant, most likely, that you had to gather up your courage and get your request okayed by Company founder Robert Wood Johnson), and only when under the direct supervision of the nurse in charge of the room.  Visitors couldn’t “mingle with the operatives,” or employees, in the room and they weren’t allowed to touch anything.  After each day’s work had concluded, all dressing materials and finished dressings were put away and a thorough cleaning was done.  Clothing and other smaller items were sterilized in the big steam sterilizer.  Tables, floors and other big things were dusted with a wet cloth, washed with antiseptic solution and then the entire room was closed and fumigated with sulfur and steam.

List of training course work and reading materials for Aseptic Department employees, 1897

So if you just followed all of those rules, you’d be all set to work in the Aseptic Department, right?  Wrong.  Employees involved in the making of the Company’s surgical dressings had to successfully pass a training course that included studying academic medical and scientific texts and reference books, answering questions and conducting experiments that educated them about the importance of preparing sterile surgical materials, the nature of the materials used in dressings and their preparation, how the dressings were used in surgery, how bacteria grew and multiplied, infection and disinfection, sterilization and aseptic techniques in the preparation of surgical dressings, and more.  Fred Kilmer noted that the aseptic rooms were at all times under the direct supervision of graduate surgical nurses, and employees had to scrub in like modern surgeons every time they entered the aseptic room. 

Aseptic Dressing Package Seal Signed by one of the Graduate Nurses, Elizabeth W——.

Illustration of Aseptic Room employee washing hands from 1897 Asepsis Secundum Artem (“According to the Art of Asepsis.”)

This detailed training and the Company’s strict requirements for manufacturing sterile dressings and sutures were in place at a time when many surgeons were still operating in their germ-covered street clothes, and Johnson & Johnson was rightly proud of its aseptic program, having pioneered these early clean room techniques. 

The reason that Johnson & Johnson gave for taking such painstaking steps was that the dressings had to be perfect because lives depended on them, a responsibility the Aseptic Department employees took very seriously.  As Fred Kilmer wrote in 1897, “The importance of the surgical dressing, the nature of its requirements, call for the greatest care.”  [Asepsis Secundum Artem, Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, NJ, 1897, p 16] 

You can still see one of the legacies of the Aseptic Department today, in the light, open design of buildings and interior spaces in the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies throughout the world.  The emphasis on bright white clean surfaces was absorbed by the future General Robert Wood Johnson and incorporated into our building designs worldwide…a very old tradition that we still follow to this day, over a hundred years later.

Then:  white enamel and walls with lots of light…

Now:  white buildings with lots of light

Today we take new technologies like high-tech videoconferencing, instant messaging, Twitter and video chats for granted.  But that wasn’t always the case.  Ninety-three years ago (on May 29th, 1916, to be exact), Johnson & Johnson took part in a demonstration of the latest cutting-edge technology:  the opening of the first transcontinental telephone line opened between New Brunswick, New Jersey and San Francisco, California.  The demonstration was such a big deal that it was held at a special Transcontinental Dinner at one of the leading hotels in New Brunswick, New Jersey. 

The Hotel Klein, Courtesy of Ken Lew’s online postcard collection

The demonstration of the new American Telephone and Telegraph Co. transcontinental line was organized by the New Brunswick Board of Trade, with the cooperation of Johnson & Johnson.  Since it was one of New Brunswick’s leading industries, and it had sales offices in San Francisco, Johnson & Johnson was chosen to participate in the event, while leading citizens “listened in” to the conversations, as Scientific Director Fred Kilmer put it, using a term so new that it was in quotation marks.  [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, Vol. IX, No. 1, September, 1916, p. 25]

James Wood Johnson was on the New Brunswick side of the call.

Among those representing the Company were President James Wood Johnson, and — in his first public appearance representing Johnson & Johnson — Robert Wood Johnson, who was 23 years old and had become a department head the previous year. 

Robert Wood Johnson was also on the call.

There were 200 attendees, including New Brunswick mayor (and Robert’s close friend) Edward F. Farrington, and Rutgers president William Demarest – who had attended the Rutgers Grammar School (Now Rutgers Prep) as a child, graduated from Rutgers College as a student, and was now its president.

The dining room in the Hotel Klein, courtesy of Ken Lew’s online postcard collection

The tables at the Hotel Klein were outfitted with individual telephone receivers for each of the guests.  Attendees listened to local dignitaries and sat through a talk on “preparedness” by a leading speaker of the day.  Shortly after 9:00 p.m. New Brunswick time, when the speeches were concluded, the attendees picked up their receivers and put them to their ears.  There was a roll call of wire chiefs from Pittsburgh to Chicago to Omaha to Denver to Salt Lake City and on until the connection finally reached San Francisco at 6:14 pm. 

A Candlestick Telephone  – the kind of phone that would have been used at the dinner

The new transcontinental connection was crystal clear.  Fred Kilmer was amazed that the participants didn’t have to shout into the telephones to be heard all the way across the country:

“Those who talked over the telephone did not raise their voices above the usual conversational pitch, and the replies came back from across the continent clear and instantaneous.  There was no more effort, delay or indistinctness than in talking across a table.”  [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, Vol. IX, No. 1, September, 1916, p. 25]

For the next hour, greetings were exchanged between the two cities.  Robert Wood Johnson had been chosen as one of the greeters, and he spoke with the Company’s San Francisco sales agent H. D. Dietrich, of Waldron & Dietrich fame.  Unlike the New Brunswick gathering, which was made up only of men, Mrs. Waldron and Mrs. Dietrich attended on the San Francisco side.

H. D. Dietrich, of Waldron & Dietrich, was on the San Francisco side of the call

The attendees in New Brunswick marveled at the new technological achievement.  Here’s what Fred Kilmer said:

“When Mr. James W. Johnson, president of Johnson & Johnson, at the New Brunswick end of the line, talked with Mr. H. D. Dietrich, at the San Francisco end, the most blasé of business men at the tables felt something akin to uncanniness at the thought that his voice had gone across thirteen states, shot over prairies and through forests, hurtled through cities, climbed the Rockies, skimmed across the desert and reached the Pacific coast, and the answer had come back in an eye-wink.”  [THE RED CROSS MESSENGER, Vol. IX, No. 1, September, 1916, p. 25]

After the greetings were over, the attendees in San Francisco sent the sound of the Pacific Ocean eastward, from a transmitter placed on Seal Rocks.  New Brunswick, having no natural water resource that was loud enough to be heard easily over a transcontinental phone line, did the next best thing and responded by singing “On the Banks of the Old Raritan.”  (Rutgers alumni, of course, STILL know that song by heart…but did you know it originally had five verses, not two?) 

A Victrola 

San Francisco followed that by transmitting the sound of a Victrola playing “Little Grey Home in the West” and, after taking that in, the dinner guests in New Brunswick finished the evening by enthusiastically singing the following:

“Good Night, Frisco!
Farewell, Frisco!
So long, Frisco!
We’re going to leave you now.
We’ll annex you by and by,
Do not sigh!  Don’t you cry!
We’ll annex you by and by,
Although we leave you now.”

With that, the Transcontinental banquet attendees on both coasts, New Brunswick and San Francisco, signed off and hung up their telephones.  Interestingly enough, transcontinental dinners seemed to be a bit of a mini-trend in 1916, with MIT and the National Geographic Society hosting them as well.  The MIT dinner guests included Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) and airplane inventor Orville Wright. (The MIT gathering was not necessarily the most academic or high-minded of the transcontinental dinners: they sang a song about drinking beer as their sign-off.)   Here’s a partial transcript of the National Geographic Society’s 1916 Transcontinental Dinner, in case anyone is curious as to exactly how these things went.

Johnson & Johnson Circa 1916 — Now Just a Transcontinental Telephone Call Away

So, why was this such a big deal for Johnson & Johnson?  Because the New Brunswick, New Jersey office was now within voice distance of the Company’s San Francisco office – the U.S. office that was the furthest away.  This meant that all of the branch offices of Johnson & Johnson were now in voice contact with the home office.  That gave Johnson & Johnson the ability respond more quickly to customer requests and questions, it put the sales offices and sales agents in closer and more immediate touch with New Brunswick, and made it possible for the Company to get its products where they were most needed far more rapidly.  Before the transcontinental line was completed, communication was either by letter (which was slow) or by telegraph – which had to be brief and not very detailed.  Just ten years earlier, after the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, Waldron & Deitrich, the Company’s west coast sales agents, had received special permission to telegraph an urgent appeal for medical supplies from San Francisco to Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick; just a short ten years later, through the marvels of modern technology, Waldron & Dietrich and New Brunswick were now in speaking distance.

When people think of LISTERINE® Antiseptic, probably the last thing they think about is electric guitars.  But they should, because LISTERINE®  and the electric guitar go back more than half a century together.  What was the connection?  It was through Les Paul (1915-2009), one of the inventors of the solid body electric guitar, who passed away this summer at age 94.  The LISTERINE®  Brand sponsored his groundbreaking television show in the 1950s.

This on-screen sponsorship ID appeared at the beginning of every episode of Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home

Starting in 1952, the LISTERINE®  Brand sponsored Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home, a five-minute long network television show broadcast from Les Paul’s home in Mahwah, New Jersey.  (That’s not a typo — the episodes were only five minutes long!)  Each episode featured Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford, and some absolutely amazing, incredible guitar playing.  The show ran for 170 episodes. 

Guitar Legend Les Paul and Mary Ford, 1952

The story goes that Les Paul relocated from Hollywood, California to New Jersey specifically to do the show because Mahwah was close to the headquarters of the Lambert Company, which made LISTERINE®  Antiseptic in the early 1950s.  (The merger that would make them into Warner-Lambert happened in 1955.)  Apparently, the Lambert Company president had heard Les Paul and Mary Ford’s hit song “How High the Moon?” and loved it so much that he came up with the idea for a LISTERINE®  – sponsored TV show broadcast from the couple’s home five days a week.  Les Paul accepted, and moved to New Jersey.  You can read the whole story on the Jazz Times website. 

Here’s one of the episodes of Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home.  Be sure to check out the vintage glass LISTERINE®  Antiseptic bottle at the beginning:

And here’s an episode in which Les Paul tries to fix their refrigerator…by serenading it!  This episode also features a vintage LISTERINE® commercial in the middle of the show.

The LISTERINE® Brand became a part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies in 2006, so we can’t take credit for the idea of sponsoring Les Paul’s television show, but it’s a fascinating piece of history that’s now part of the collective history of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies. 

From the video clip above, Les Paul plays for his refrigerator

By the way, not only was Les Paul a pioneer in inventing the solid body electric guitar, he also invented multitrack recording, tape delay and many other things that we take for granted as part of modern music.  Most people know Les Paul for the Gibson Les Paul guitar, one of the most recognizable and iconic electric guitars in the world.

The guitar that needs no introduction:  The Gibson Les Paul

So the next time you pick up that bottle of LISTERINE® in your bathroom, you’ll know that you’re not just holding an antiseptic mouthwash first formulated in 1879…you’re ALSO holding the product that sponsored Les Paul — the legend who helped make not only rock music but modern recording techniques possible. 

From Les Paul and Mary Ford’s TV show:  perhaps the most interesting LISTERINE® spokesperson…er, spokes-frog, ever.

And because this is just WAY too good to pass up, here’s one last episode of Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home, with a talking cartoon frog advertising LISTERINE® Antiseptic!

Question:  How many of the three Johnson & Johnson founders also started another successful company?  Answer:  Two of them.

Readers of Kilmer House know that Edward Mead Johnson left Johnson & Johnson in the 1890s to found another business, based on products to help infant digestion – a business that is still around today.  But did you know that Company founder Robert Wood Johnson was a founding partner in another health and medical products business before Johnson & Johnson?  That business was Seabury & Johnson.  Here’s the story:

Wood & Tittamer, Poughkeepsie, New York

It was 1861, the American Civil War had just started, and sixteen-year-old Robert Wood Johnson, the future founder of Johnson & Johnson, was travelling from his home state of Pennsylvania to upstate New York.  He was on his way to start his apprenticeship as a drug clerk in Wood & Tittamer, an apothecary shop in Poughkeepsie belonging to his mother’s family.  The apprenticeship was his parents’ idea.  Sylvester and Louisa Johnson already had two older sons serving with the Pennsylvania Volunteers and the Union Army, and they were reluctant to have a third son join the conflict.   Their decision had far-reaching consequences, because Robert was so influenced by his pharmacy experience that he made health care his career.

The Place That Launched a Thousand Companies:  A Retail Drug Store Interior in 1912

 
Toward the end of 1864, Robert completed his apprenticeship and got a job as an order clerk in a well-known wholesale drug firm, Rushton & Aspinwall, in lower Manhattan.  In a perfect example of the fact that you can find ANYTHING online, here’s a picture of an actual Rushton & Aspinwall medicine bottle, if anyone’s interested. 

Robert Wood Johnson the first

In 1868, after four years with Rushton & Aspinwall, Johnson set out on his own as a broker and importer of drugs and chemicals, with his own office (actually, it was just a desk) in a building on Platt Street.  There he met slightly older fellow drug broker George J. Seabury, whose plans to become a physician had been interrupted by the Civil War.  Seabury was from a prominent family and had served in one of New York’s regiments during the conflict.  In 1873 George Seabury and Robert Wood Johnson decided to go into business together as…you guessed it…Seabury & Johnson.  Seabury became president and Johnson was corporate secretary and sales manager.

George Seabury

As their business grew, it moved from Platt Street to South Brooklyn, and then to East Orange, New Jersey, where you can still visit the old Seabury & Johnson buildings, still standing today.  Seabury & Johnson was by then a well-respected medical products business, known for the quality of its medicated plasters.   In fact, one of the reasons Robert Wood Johnson was at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia — where he heard Sir Joseph Lister speak about antiseptic surgery — was because Seabury & Johnson was awarded a prize for its product exhibition there. 

Seabury & Johnson Iodoform Gauze

Inspired by Lord Lister, Robert Wood Johnson wanted to mass-produce aseptic gauze and dressings for physicians to use in sterile surgery; George Seabury wanted to concentrate on expanding the Company’s existing medical plaster business instead.

Seabury & Johnson Employees, East Orange, NJ, late 1800s

In 1876, George Seabury decided to bring his brother into the business, which led Robert Wood Johnson to hire two brothers, Edward Mead Johnson that same year and James Wood Johnson in 1878.  (Since James Wood Johnson, with his engineering talents, went on to build machinery that solved many of the problems in medicated plaster manufacturing, this turned out to be an excellent decision.)  Seabury had resigned himself to having two Johnson brothers join the business, but he became downright alarmed when he found out that Johnson actually had five brothers, and he worried that Johnson would hire the rest of them.  (He didn’t.) 

Both partners had strong ideas and opinions about the direction of the business, which led to some interesting discussions and later, to many colorful disagreements that were noted in the minutes of their meetings.  As corporate secretary, Robert Wood Johnson kept the meeting minutes and he didn’t hesitate to put his own observations into the company’s official record.  As time went on, Seabury frequently added his own comments to the margins when he disagreed with what Johnson had written.  (Sample observation from Johnson:  “ ‘Subject to usual discord!’ ”  Sample comment from Seabury:  “ ‘A deliberate lie, GJS.’ ”)  [Robert Wood Johnson, The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999, p. 36-37] 

In 1884 they started talking about breaking up the partnership, which alarmed Edward Mead Johnson enough to cause him to leave the business.  In January of 1885, Seabury refused to attend the annual stockholder meeting.  (There were only two stockholders:   Seabury and Johnson.) On July 10 there was yet another disagreement about the way meeting minutes were being recorded.  Finally, on July 18, 1885, Johnson resigned from the business and sold his half-interest to Seabury, the payment being made mostly by promissory notes.  Johnson had to agree not to enter the medical products business for ten years.   James Wood Johnson resigned the same day.

Artist’s rendition of the first Johnson & Johnson building

After unsuccessfully trying a typewriter manufacturing business, James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson decided to return to the medical products field.  They started Johnson & Johnson in 1886 with 14 employees on the fourth floor of a former wallpaper factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  It no doubt irked Seabury that the new company’s first employees were former Seabury & Johnson employees.  George Seabury kept the name Seabury & Johnson and continued on.  To relieve Seabury’s concerns about his brothers’ new firm, Robert Wood Johnson wrote a letter telling his siblings in clear terms that he would not in any way take part in their new business.  Here’s a quote from his letter, as reproduced in Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel: 

“I must again draw your attention to the fact that Seabury & Johnson are an old established house, have unlimited capital and credit and can at any moment sew up your small means.  I strongly advise you to think the matter over very carefully before you engage in a contest with Seabury.

In order to fairly compete with them, you should have at least five times the capital you now have.

I will now add that if you determine to engage in the plaster business from this time on, I shall refuse to aid or assist you and will not even talk with you on the subject.”  [Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, Lillian Press, 1999, p. 42]

The agreement ending the partnership required George Seabury to make periodic payments to Robert Wood Johnson.  By the summer of 1886, he had missed several payments and Johnson suggested that the agreement be ended.  Seabury reluctantly agreed, and Johnson was now free to rejoin the medical products business.  On September 23, 1886, Johnson published an open letter to the drug trade stating that he would be joining his brothers as the head of Johnson & Johnson and the rest was, as they say, history.  Mead Johnson was so excited about it that he wrote to a Company salesman saying that his brother’s arrival would “create a boom” with the public.  Robert Wood Johnson brought much-needed energy, enthusiasm, and capital to Johnson & Johnson, not to mention his considerable business skills.  So important was Johnson’s letter that the Company reprinted it in the front of its first price list. 

Reproduction of Robert Wood Johnson’s letter in first Johnson & Johnson price list

With Johnson & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson was able to put in place his plans to manufacture and market the first mass produced sterile surgical dressings in the U.S., and to promote the practice of antiseptic surgery.  The Company’s success and willingness to innovate allowed Johnson and his brothers to quickly expand their product lines well beyond the medicated plasters and sterile dressings and sutures that were among the first Johnson & Johnson products. 

Although George Seabury is a footnote in Johnson & Johnson history, he is also known for writing a number of articles, pamphlets and books.  These were mostly on fairly dry pharmaceutical, economic, and political subjects, with the exception of his most well-known work, “An Ode to Lake Bass.”  (Apparently Seabury liked to fish.) You can read Seabury’s elaborately illustrated poem online in digitized book form here.  And here’s a notice in the 1885-1886 edition of The Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal, announcing the dissolution of Robert Wood Johnson and George Seabury’s partnership.

And finally, there’s an odd coincidence, for anyone who’s noticed while reading this post:  every firm that Robert Wood Johnson either worked for or started has had an ampersand in its name – a tradition that we are proud to carry forward at Johnson & Johnson!

Thanks to Lawrence G. Foster for his extensive research into Seabury & Johnson history, in his book Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel.