Kilmer House

Members of the Johnson & Johnson Women’s Basketball Team, 1946-1947 champions of the New Brunswick Industrial League As a company that will be 125 years old in 2011, Johnson & Johnson has many traditions:  some recent, and some dating back almost to our founding.  One of the most fun traditions throughout our history has been our employee athletes and sports teams. The Johnson & Johnson Employee Baseball Team: Our Earliest Employee Team For well over 100 years, employees at Johnson & Johnson have participated in organized sports.  The earliest record we have of our employee ath

Regular readers of Kilmer House know that Johnson & Johnson has been a pioneer in many areas of health care, but we also led the way in another, lesser known area as well: singing.  Singing? Yes, singing!  The massive success of the hit television show Glee has renewed people’s interest in glee clubs, so this seems like the perfect time to point out that, starting in 1942, Johnson & Johnson employees had a very popular Glee Club of their own that performed regularly at local and not-so-local events, sang on the radio and even appeared with a Hollywood movie star. Glee: decades before

As we start to celebrate our 125th anniversary year at Johnson & Johnson, our hometown of New Brunswick, New Jersey has been digging out of record amounts of snowfall – as have many other areas this winter. Ninety years ago: clearing away snow at Johnson & Johnson. Here’s a look back at Johnson & Johnson on February 21, 1921, the day after a huge snowstorm. One employee is digging a path through the snow, while another employee stands waist-deep in a snowdrift.  The Cotton Mill is the large building on the left, and the Company’s offices and a storage building are on the right.  Th

By the time Fred Kilmer wrote back to Sir Joseph Lister in 1891, he was able to describe in great detail the Company’s sterilization and manufacturing procedures – including our Aseptic Room, the steam sterilizers and the water filtration system.  These high-tech facilities and pioneering equipment were all made possible by another partnership during the early days of Johnson & Johnson: the partnership between science and engineering as personified by James Wood Johnson and Fred Kilmer. Mr. Science…meet Mr. Engineering. Fred Kilmer (left) and James Wood Johnson (right) When James Wood John

Alert Kilmer House readers will have noticed that their favorite blog about Johnson & Johnson history suddenly looks a little different.  The new look of Kilmer House incorporates elements that made some of the early Johnson & Johnson publications so unique and eye-catching, like the basket weave design used to outline some of the sections in the right-hand column of the blog, and images that have appeared in some of our early publications and advertising.  The idea behind the new look is to make Kilmer House look like it could be a Johnson & Johnson blog from 100 years ago, illust

We know that Johnson & Johnson employees had The Laurel Club, an organization for women employees formed in 1907 whose members started the tradition of Johnson & Johnson employees exercising at work and volunteering in the community.  And employees formed a very popular Glee Club, which performed on the radio and sang with a movie star.  But they also formed a wide variety of other clubs, too, and in the 1940s through 1960s, if there was an interest among Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies employees, there was probably an employee club to go with it. The Nut & Bolt Club, one

Johnson & Johnson employees celebrate the 125th anniversary of Johnson & Johnson As readers of Kilmer House know, Johnson & Johnson is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year.  Our employees across the world have been acknowledging this milestone anniversary in a variety of ways in their operating companies -- as well as some of their individual operating company anniversaries that also fall this year.  These ongoing events in 2011 are maintaining an anniversary tradition at Johnson & Johnson that goes back 105 years. 105 Years Ago: Johnson & Johnson celebrated its 20th

In commemoration of the 125th anniversary of Johnson & Johnson this year, we’ve put together a new video about our history called Johnson & Johnson, Our History: Our Mission.  The video has many photographs, artifacts, documents and films from our archives that have never been seen before, and it tells the story of the founding and history of Johnson & Johnson and the ideas and philosophy that have been the backbone of the Company for 125 years. The story begins in Crystal Lake, Pennsylvania during the years of the American Civil War… Enjoy, and feel free to share the video wi

As we celebrate Veterans Day, we remember the men and women past and present who serve their countries.  At Johnson & Johnson, our employees have a long tradition of service that dates back to the Spanish American War in 1898 -- which started some traditions here that we still have today. During these times, Johnson & Johnson employees supported each other, sent care packages to their colleagues in the military, and kept each other current on the news -- both from the Company and from those serving in the military.  During World War II, employees maintained this tradition of support as

In 2011, Johnson & Johnson celebrated its 125th anniversary. When the Company began in 1886, the original 14 employees in our first building -- that small former wallpaper factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey -- could not have foreseen that 125 years later, their tiny little business would be a global company with approximately 117,000 employees at more than 250 operating companies in 60 countries. Those early employees were very creative in developing new manufacturing techniques to make the first mass produced sterile surgical dressings and sterile sutures, and that creativity has stayed