Johnson & Johnson grew out of a lecture on germs by Joseph Lister
At the 1876 Centennial Exposition, a young businessman named Robert Wood Johnson heard Joseph Lister explain how germs infect wounds. A decade later he and two brothers began making ready-to-use sterile surgical dressings with 14 staff. Their company went on to invent the Band-Aid and helped give the world duct tape.
Johnson trained from age 16 as an apprentice at a relative's apothecary in Poughkeepsie, then co-founded Seabury & Johnson, known for medicated plasters. In 1886 he, James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson set up in an old factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with eight women and six men. No one had manufactured germ-free surgical supplies before; their sutures, gauze and cotton were the first, and in 1888 sent 85,000 copies of a guide to antiseptic wound treatment to doctors and pharmacists. Their first scientific director, pharmacist Fred Kilmer, hired in 1889, developed an industrial sterilisation process.
Consumer products soon followed. Johnson's Baby Powder arrived in 1894, the same year as what the company calls the first maternity kit, packed with sterile supplies for home births. In 1920 employee Earle Dickson stuck gauze onto adhesive tape to make the first commercial adhesive bandage, sold as Band-Aid from the following year. During the Second World War, Vesta Stoudt wrote to President Roosevelt asking for a waterproof tape to seal ammunition boxes, and a J&J subsidiary, Revolite, developed the cloth tape later known as duct tape.
The firm's workforce policies stood out. By 1910 women were half its employees and ran a quarter of its departments. It donated dressings to soldiers in the Spanish–American War and relief after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In the Great Depression it kept everyone employed and raised wages 5%, and Robert Wood Johnson II urged Roosevelt to legislate higher wages and shorter hours.
Before its 1944 stock market listing, the younger Johnson wrote Our Credo, a statement of values still used to guide decisions. Now headquartered in New Brunswick, the company ranks No. 42 on the 2026 Fortune 500, and alongside Microsoft it is one of only two US companies holding a top AAA credit rating.
Source: Johnson & Johnson
