Kilmer House

Sometimes a chance conversation can lead to unexpected things.  In Johnson & Johnson history, conversations have led to some very well-known products from our Family of Companies.  A conversation in the late 1800s between one of our founders and someone he met on vacation led to something that’s a part of modern life:  The First Aid Kit.  Here’s how it happened. Vintage 1930s First Aid Kit, from our archives One day in the late 1880s, Company founder Robert Wood Johnson was on a Denver & Rio Grande train heading west through the Rocky Mountains, on his way to a much anticipated vacatio

In honor of the 125th birthday of Johnson & Johnson this year, here are 12.5 things you didn’t know about Johnson & Johnson: 1. Johnson & Johnson and the American College of Surgeons co-sponsored the first televised surgical operation in 1947.  The procedure was transmitted from an operating room at the New York Hospital to an audience of 300 people at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, two miles away.  [Johnson & Johnson Bulletin Oct/Nov 1972] 2. The founding of Johnson & Johnson is mentioned in the novel The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.  The mention comes in a diary entry

  BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages are one of the most recognizable of the Company’s products.   They were invented in 1920 by an employee named Earle Dickson, who worked as a cotton buyer.  His wife Josephine was prone to kitchen accidents.  Earle wanted a bandage his wife could apply herself, so he took two of the Company’s early products – adhesive tape and gauze – and combined them by laying out a long piece of surgical tape and placing a strip of gauze down the middle. To keep the adhesive from sticking, he covered it with crinoline fabric.  Whenever his wif

In the late 1940s, a very well-known American artist had a connection to Johnson & Johnson first aid products.  (And no, it wasn’t because the artist was accident-prone.)  This artist had paintings in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and her works were widely exhibited in other places.  The artist was Gladys Rockmore Davis, and she was a noted painter of children and other subjects.  In 1948, Johnson & Johnson commissioned Davis to do a series of original paintings of children for an advertising campaign for the Company’s fir

Since it earliest days, Johnson & Johnson has made products in response to a variety of needs in society.  Some of these products – sterile surgical dressings and sutures, the first First Aid Kits, an antibacterial soap to combat infection, were discussed widely.  But there was one equally obvious need that no one wanted to talk about, even though products to address it made life easier for roughly half the population.  And that was the need for the first mass produced women’s sanitary products.  Women in the 1920s Buying MODESS® Before the era of commercially ava

As readers of Kilmer House -- and The Duct Tape Guys’ popular website – know, duct tape was invented by a Johnson & Johnson operating company in response to a request from the U.S. military for a cloth-based, waterproof tape during World War II.  But have you ever wondered why the Army made that request, and who had the original idea for duct tape?  Well, wonder no more, thanks to Kilmer House reader Kari Santo, whose great grandmother Vesta Stoudt had the idea that led to duct tape. Meet Vesta Stoudt, whose idea led to duct tape! Photo from The Chicago Sunday Tribune, October 24th 1943 In

Game shows.  Moustaches.  Hollywood movie studios.  Doll clothing.  They can’t all be connected to Johnson & Johnson…or can they?  Of course, they can!  Read on to discover seven more things you didn’t know about J&J. 1.    In the mid-1950s, iconic comedian and television pioneer Imogene Coca advertised the Company’s first aid products on television, as part of Johnson & Johnson’s “Emergencies Don’t Wait” campaign.  Here’s a photo of her overreacting in horror to the fact that her medicine cabinet is lacking first aid supplies…something that the Company hoped to remedy with its 19

Johnson & Johnson was founded in 1886.  But this product – our oldest – dates from 1879.    How is that possible?  And what’s more, how did a product that started as a surgical disinfectant end up as a mouthwash? The product is LISTERINE® Antiseptic, and it became part of our consumer product portfolio with the acquisition of Pfizer Consumer Healthcare in 2006.  Despite its recent tenure with the Company, our new oldest product has something in common with the first products made by Johnson & Johnson:  it was inspired by Sir Joseph Lister.  Sir

Dental floss has been called “the new duct tape” (a product that also has a tie to Johnson & Johnson!) because of its many inventive uses by consumers.  As bizarre as some of these uses may be, the product’s origins are equally unusual, and they go back not only to the beginnings of Johnson & Johnson, but to the early days of one of its medical devices affiliate companies as well. Although people have apparently been using things to clean between their teeth since prehistoric times, this article in American Heritage explains that dental floss was officially invented somewher

Today we take pristine white cotton swabs, cotton balls and sterile cotton dressings for granted, but over 125 years ago it was a very different story.  Cotton in the 1800s was not very useful as a dressing, and you wouldn’t have wanted to use it as a personal care item.  The natural oils in the plant fibers made it non-absorbent and it was, as Fred Kilmer described it, (you may want to put down your coffee while reading this one)  “…yellow and dirty...it was put up in wads, packed in any sort of a box or wrapped in loose paper.”   [RED CROSS® Notes, Series II, No. 9, 1899.  Published by John