Kilmer House

There's a popular saying that you can't put toothpaste back into a tube. But you CAN come up with the idea to put toothpaste into a tube, and do you know who was one of the first companies to do that? If you answered Johnson & Johnson, you would be correct! That toothpaste was Zonweiss, our first consumer product. Johnson & Johnson made it available for sale in collapsible metal tubes in 1889 - three and seven years before the oldest commonly accepted claims of 1892 and 1896 for that innovation. Here's the story. Zonweiss ad, 1886, from our archives The first ads for Zonweiss appeared

Johnson & Johnson has been located in New Brunswick, New Jersey ever since a fortunate train journey brought Company founder James Wood Johnson to the city in January of 1886.  The former wallpaper factory building that Johnson rented met the needs of the new company, and New Brunswick turned out to be a very good location for a new business for many other reasons.  It had transportation (the railroad, the Delaware & Raritan Canal, the Raritan River, and stagecoach service), it had lots of potential future employees, and it was just bursting with suppliers.  New Brunswick in the late 1