Kilmer House

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. It’s 1887 and Johnson & Johnson has grown in just one year from 14 employees in one building to 125 employees in several buildings.  Our original building from 1886, the four-story former wallpaper factory, is now the plaster mill, filled with machinery designed by founder James Wood Johnson to

It’s a sign of the times.  People feel hurried, under stress in a time of rapid change.  Their diets have expanded but they’re not eating the right foods.  And all of that is taking a toll on their digestion.   Quick --what year is it?  The answer may surprise you:  it’s 1888.    Indigestion, or dyspepsia, was so common in the United States at the end of the 19th century that it was referred to as America’s “national disease.”  The diet at the time was heavily tilted toward meat and potatoes (even for breakfast!) accompanied by heavy sweets, such as cakes and pies.  The need for products to c

From the earliest days of Johnson & Johnson, the Johnson brothers recognized the importance of advertising, and Robert Wood Johnson the first was often personally very involved in the development of ads for the Company’s products…sometimes too involved, the people at the advertising agency felt.  Johnson had excellent instincts about what would and wouldn’t work, and he kept J. Walter Thompson and his advertising agency busy with his many suggestions and changes. Thompson and Johnson were friends, and Thompson handled the Johnson & Johnson account personally.  (Robert Wood Johnson: The

Regular readers of Kilmer House know that Johnson & Johnson has been a pioneer in many areas of health care, but we also led the way in another, lesser known area as well: singing.  Singing? Yes, singing!  The massive success of the hit television show Glee has renewed people’s interest in glee clubs, so this seems like the perfect time to point out that, starting in 1942, Johnson & Johnson employees had a very popular Glee Club of their own that performed regularly at local and not-so-local events, sang on the radio and even appeared with a Hollywood movie star. Glee: decades before

RED CROSS® Kidney Plaster Ad in Slavonic from 1912  In recognition of the diversity of the world we live in, companies have been doing more and more multicultural advertising in recent years.  It's a necessity for any company that wants to reach its customers, especially customers who for a variety of reasons are not being reached through traditional mainstream advertising.  And certainly what is true now also was true almost 100 years ago.    Ad for Belladonna Plasters in Italian from 1912 The early part of the 1900s saw huge waves of immigration to the United States from Italy, Ireland, Cen