Kilmer House

  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