Kilmer House

A Chairman and CEO is writing a book.  Having led his company through The Great Depression, he’s concerned with improving living standards to decrease what he sees as a consistent state of scarcity for large parts of the population.  He realizes that his concern about providing goods, services and wages to alleviate scarcity, and in fact the entire future of business itself, depend on something that most people weren’t even thinking about yet:  conserving and sustaining the natural resources of the planet.  The year?  1947.  The business leader:  Robert Wood

It's getting towards the end of April --  time for the Johnson & Johnson Annual Meeting of Shareholders.  Since we went public in 1944, you might be forgiven for thinking that our Annual Meetings started on a spring Thursday at the end of April 66 years ago -- but they didn't.  In fact, we’ve had Annual Meetings since 1888, they used to be in the winter, and the first one was held on a Saturday.  By special request, I’m reposting a post from last year: read on to find out how much you REALLY know about our Annual Meeting. The Earliest Meetings:  Meet Our

With Mother’s Day coming up in the U.S. on May 9th, Kilmer House would like to salute all of the Moms throughout our history and in our present.  This is the first in a series of three Mother’s Day posts that talk about some of our history that is connected to mothers.  One of the ways Johnson & Johnson supported mothers starting in the 1890s was through the manufacture of maternity kits, designed to insure safe childbirth for the mother and baby. Today, there are countless books, websites, online communities and classes for expectant parents to prepare them for the birth of a ch

One of the historic LISTERINE® ads used in the documentary This is a little different from the topics I usually post about, but my colleagues at our consumer operating company recently did a really cool documentary about LISTERINE® Antiseptic, and they asked me to be in it to talk about some of the early history of the product.  Actor Neil Patrick Harris is the narrator, and if you go to the This is Your Mouth site to watch it (which is why I’m not embedding the video here!), not only will you get to hear a certain blogger, but – more important – our operating company that makes LISTERIN

A Design Classic! 1.  What do BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages have in common with the @ symbol on your computer keyboard?  They’re both part of the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Here’s the link to the BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage entry on the MOMA design collection website.  (By the way, because the product is in the collection of an art museum, Earle Dickson, the inventor of BAND-AID®, is listed as the artist on the site!) 2.  There was a fourth Johnson in the early days of Johnson & Johnson!  William Johnso

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 Johnso

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 swee

To help everyone cool down in the end-of-summer heat, Kilmer House brings you ten cool things from our archives.  Enjoy! 1. A 1927 price list that belonged to Earle Dickson, inventor of the BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage.  The pages inside have handwritten notes by Dickson and, yes, his invention is listed, on page 11.  Here's the page that was most meaningful to Earle Dickson, with his handwriting. 2. A Zonweiss ad from 1887, the year after Johnson & Johnson was founded.  This one shows figures from Ancient Roman mythology discussing the merits of Zonwei

There’s nothing worse than losing the instructions for something you’ve bought, especially if it’s something you need to use in an emergency. Some people keep all of their instruction manuals in an envelope or a folder, or in an electronic file, which is fine...as long as they remember where they put the file. But there is a better way, and it was discovered by the creator of a famous product that became part of our product lines over 100 years ago. Now where did I put the instruction booklet? The product was the Esmarch Triangular Bandage, a very well known wound treatment and First Aid prod

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