Kilmer House

A Peek Inside One of Our Offices in the Mid-1940s 1. The Company started on the fourth floor of an old wallpaper factory. 2. In the Nineteen-teens, before air conditioning, Johnson & Johnson had a swimming pool for employees – at work! -- so they could cool off in the summer heat. 3. When he was younger, Robert Wood Johnson the first was known to wear a stovepipe hat.  (We don’t have a picture of him wearing the hat in our archives, unfortunately.) 4. Barry Manilow wrote the “I Am Stuck on BAND-AID® Brand…” jingle. 5. John Travolta, Terri Garr and Brooke Shields all appeared in BAND-AID®

What’s the weirdest thing ever made by the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies?  Was it a tonic medicine with a sherry base?  Or sausage casings?  Or doll clothing?  (Yes, we once made that too, out of non-woven fabric.  That’s the subject of a future post.) Or maybe beauty spots?  Or duct tape?  Or maybe…it was rubber bands. Some Typical Modern Non-Company Related Rubber Bands So…we made rubber bands?  Yes we actually did -- or to be more accurate, one of our acquisitions did in 1910.   Readers of Kilmer House will remember that the Company made its first major acquisition in 1905 whe

At the end of my next to last post, I asked the question:  what did people use to fix everything before duct tape was invented by a Johnson & Johnson affiliate company in 1942?  Was there a “duct tape” before duct tape?  It turns out that there was…and oddly enough, it also was a product from the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies:  ZONAS® Adhesive Plaster. ZONAS® Adhesive Plaster was a rubber-based adhesive tape.  The unusual brand name of ZONAS® derived not from a person’s last name (there were no “Zonas Brothers” behind the product), but from the fact that the product was made w

Here’s a quick quiz.  From the description of this Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies product, would the consumer using it be more likely to be listening to music on an MP3 player, or cranking up one of those old fashioned gramophones?  The product is a liquid bandage that’s applied with an applicator.  It forms a transparent, waterproof coating that keeps small wounds covered while they heal, and it won’t wash off with soap and water.  Any guesses?  Here’s the answer:  get that gramophone out of the museum, because the product was Cotolia Liquid Court Plaster and, 100 years ago, it was

Here’s another special behind the scenes video tour of some lesser known items from Johnson & Johnson history.  If you’ve ever wondered where the last loading dock for horse drawn wagons at Johnson & Johnson is located, which unusual 1960s fashion was made by one of our operating companies, why we once made doll clothing, and how we got from medicated plasters to JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder, you’ll know the answers to all of those questions after you watch this post.   You’ll also be able to see -- for the first time -- letters from two of our founders written in 1887, just a year after the