Kilmer House

The Origins of our McNeil Business -- the Mc Neil Family Pharmacy Retail pharmacies have been important in Johnson & Johnson history for a number of reasons.  Before the days of supermarkets, they were the places that sold our products to consumers – from medicated plasters to Lister’s Dog Soap to JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder to BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages.  But retail pharmacies are also a big part of our history in another way:  if it hadn’t been for them, Johnson & Johnson – and some of its operating companies – might not be here at all.  Why is that? 

In recognition of the 100th anniversary of the passing of Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson in 1910, this is one of several posts looking at the earliest years of Johnson & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson as our first president, and the Company’s first senior management transition. 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 r

The First Johnson & Johnson building in New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1886 It’s the winter of 1886, and Company founders James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson have solved the issue of where to put their new company, thanks to James’s very lucky train journey.  New Brunswick, New Jersey turned out to be a great location:  it had the railroad, the Delaware & Raritan Canal and the Raritan River to transport raw materials to the new company, and to ship products out.  And it had a lot of other industries -- a cigar box manufacturer, and a fruit jar manufacturer, for example -- that would

Like every new company just starting out, Johnson & Johnson advertised, and the earliest Johnson & Johnson ad in our archives happens to be from 1886 – the year we started.  The 1886 ad is for our first consumer product, Zonweiss, which was a tooth cream -- the late Victorian version of a toothpaste.  Zonweiss, which meant “white teeth” in German, was applied to the toothbrush with a tiny spoon that was included in the package.  In a few years, when we became one of the first companies to package toothpaste – Zonweiss, of course – in that new innovation, a collapsible tube, the spoon w

Johnson & Johnson employees celebrate the 125th anniversary of Johnson & Johnson As readers of Kilmer House know, Johnson & Johnson is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year.  Our employees across the world have been acknowledging this milestone anniversary in a variety of ways in their operating companies -- as well as some of their individual operating company anniversaries that also fall this year.  These ongoing events in 2011 are maintaining an anniversary tradition at Johnson & Johnson that goes back 105 years. 105 Years Ago: Johnson & Johnson celebrated its 20th

In commemoration of the 125th anniversary of Johnson & Johnson this year, we’ve put together a new video about our history called Johnson & Johnson, Our History: Our Mission.  The video has many photographs, artifacts, documents and films from our archives that have never been seen before, and it tells the story of the founding and history of Johnson & Johnson and the ideas and philosophy that have been the backbone of the Company for 125 years. The story begins in Crystal Lake, Pennsylvania during the years of the American Civil War… Enjoy, and feel free to share the video wi

In 2011, Johnson & Johnson celebrated its 125th anniversary. When the Company began in 1886, the original 14 employees in our first building -- that small former wallpaper factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey -- could not have foreseen that 125 years later, their tiny little business would be a global company with approximately 117,000 employees at more than 250 operating companies in 60 countries. Those early employees were very creative in developing new manufacturing techniques to make the first mass produced sterile surgical dressings and sterile sutures, and that creativity has stayed

Sir Joseph Lister, from our archives This February marks the 100th anniversary of the passing of Sir Joseph Lister.  The father of modern antiseptic surgery, he was also the inspiration behind the founding of Johnson & Johnson.  It was Lister’s lecture at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition that led medicinal plaster maker Robert Wood Johnson and his brothers to start a company to make the first mass produced sterile surgical dressings and sterile sutures and actively promote the adoption of sterile surgery.  Today, non-sterile surgery would be unthinkable, but it wasn’t all that l

As regular readers of Kilmer House know, Johnson & Johnson has been making sterile sutures since the late 1880s. Until Johnson & Johnson became a global decentralized company, our operations were largely based in New Brunswick, N.J., the city in which we were founded, and we sold our products throughout the world through sales agents as part of a thriving export business.  However, during the Nineteen Teens, the disruptions caused by World War I made it harder for some areas of the world to import our products and those of other manufacturers.  (That was one of the things that led Gene

First Aid Kits are so central a part of modern life that it’s hard to imagine a time in which they didn’t exist.  But before Johnson & Johnson began making the first commercial first aid kits in 1888, people were on their own when it came to gathering and maintaining the right supplies to use in treating injuries and in knowing how to help someone in case of an injury.  A century and a quarter ago, that changed in a very social media-inspired way:  through a conversation. As this story from 1882 -- concerning our very own Fred Kilmer -- shows, when someone was injured before the era of fi