Kilmer House

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

With this week being National Public Health Week and April being National Volunteer Month, it’s a perfect opportunity to go back in time and let an early Johnson & Johnson employee who was on the front lines of public health improvement talk about some of his volunteer efforts in that area.  How can we do that?  We don’t have a time machine (despite a Six Degrees of Separation connection to H. G. Wells!), but we do have a first-hand account from one of our employees who spent many years volunteering to improve public health, starting at a time when the field was in its infancy.  That emplo

Revra DePuy  Did you know that oldest orthopaedics company in the world started in a small room in an Indiana hotel?  That company is DePuy, Inc. (part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies since 1998) and it’s named after its founder, a man named Revra DePuy.   Revra DePuy was born in 1860 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  His family moved to Canada shortly after his birth and later returned to the U.S. when his father died, settling in Illinois.  According to the DePuy family thread on Rootsweb, the family saw some hard times during this period. 

What do General Robert Wood Johnson, Frank Sinatra, Albert Einstein, Bruce Springsteen and Toni Morrison all have in common?  They are among the first group of inductees into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Yesterday (May 4th) General Robert Wood Johnson was among the first group of New Jersey citizens inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, sharing the occasion with other notable New Jerseyans Harriet Tubman, Thomas Alva Edison, Albert Einstein, Clara Barton, Frank Sinatra, Buzz Aldrin, Yogi Berra, Malcolm Forbes, Vince Lombardi, General Norman Schwarzkopf, Toni Morrison, Bruce Springst

Spooky postcards, the search for a missing explorer, a classic film noir, black cats, and a mysterious castle.  What do all of those things have to do with Johnson & Johnson?  Read on to find out, in a special Halloween edition of Nine More Things You Didn’t Know About Johnson & Johnson. Today we would just text, but a century ago, postcards were a popular way to send a short note to someone. Many towns and businesses (including Johnson & Johnson) printed photo postcards for that purpose.  Courtesy of the New Brunswick Free Public Library’s online postcard collection, here’s a spo