Kilmer House

Question:  How many of the three Johnson & Johnson founders also started another successful company?  Answer:  Two of them. Readers of Kilmer House know that Edward Mead Johnson left Johnson & Johnson in the 1890s to found another business, based on products to help infant digestion – a business that is still around today.  But did you know that Company founder Robert Wood Johnson was a founding partner in another health and medical products business before Johnson & Johnson?  That business was Seabury & Johnson.  Here’s the story: Wood & Titt

When people think of LISTERINE® Antiseptic, probably the last thing they think about is electric guitars.  But they should, because LISTERINE®  and the electric guitar go back more than half a century together.  What was the connection?  It was through Les Paul (1915-2009), one of the inventors of the solid body electric guitar, who passed away this summer at age 94.  The LISTERINE®  Brand sponsored his groundbreaking television show in the 1950s. This on-screen sponsorship ID appeared at the beginning of every episode of Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home Start

One of the affiliate companies in the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies is known for its tradition of using famous actresses in its advertising.  As it turns out, actresses like Jennifer Garner in the U.S. and Deepika Padukone in India are not the first celebrities to endorse our products.  Some very well-known actresses (and some actors and athletes) were also singing the praises of one of our products almost 100 years ago, in the Nineteen Teens…  The product was Synol Soap, an antiseptic soap, and famous Broadway and vaudeville actresses o

If things had turned out differently for James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson, two of the three brothers who founded Johnson & Johnson, they might be known for making not the first mass produced sterile surgical dressings and sterile sutures, but typewriters.  Typewriters? An earlier post talked about Seabury & Johnson, older brother Robert Wood Johnson’s partnership, a well-respected medical products business of the late 1800s.  James and Edward both had joined Seabury & Johnson, but the increasing disagreements between the partners -- Robert Wood Johnson and Georg

Johnson & Johnson was started by James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson early in 1886 with 14 employees.  Once he was free of his obligations to Seabury & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson the first joined the new company toward the end of the year.  Here’s a list of the 14 original Johnson & Johnson employees who worked in New Brunswick, in the first building:  W. H. Ritter James Smith Thomas Burley Elmer Briscoe Patrick Higgins Harry Smith M. S. Denman Kate Coogan Maggie Smith Annie Keegan Elizabeth Cahill Teresa Smith Agnes King Lizzie Kennedy It is interesting to

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

One of Our Early Employee Volunteers Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies employees all over the world have a long tradition of volunteering in the community.  It reflects their feelings of responsibility to the communities in which they live and work, and it forms the basis of the third paragraph of Our Credo.  One thing that very few people know is that our tradition of employees volunteering in the community goes back over 100 years…and our earliest records show that it was started by women employees.  So, how did it start? Another Early Employee Volunteer E

Johnson & Johnson Plaster Mill Employee (left) and fellow soldier, Spanish American War, 1898 My last post talked about the origins of our tradition of employees volunteering in the community. Another way our employees volunteered was through military service to their countries, a tradition that began in 1898 with the Spanish American War when two Johnson & Johnson employees in the U.S. volunteered to serve in the military. One of Our First Two Employees to Volunteer to Serve in the Military in 1898: He Wrote the Company a Letter One of those two employees, Richard G., had just accep

In the earliest days of the Company, Johnson & Johnson was centered in the city of New Brunswick, where it still is headquartered today.  Although the research labs were located across the river in Highland Park, the plaster making facilities, warehouses, cotton mill, shipping and other facilities were located close to the river in New Brunswick.  Besides the Company’s World Headquarters (which still occupies roughly the same site at which the Company started), New Brunswick is home to other sites of historical significance to Johnson & Johnson.  Like most of their

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