History
Inspired by a speech by antiseptic advocate Joseph Lister, Robert Wood Johnson, joined brothers James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson to create a line of ready-to-use surgical dressings in 1885. The company produced its first products in 1886 and incorporated in 1887.
Robert Wood Johnson served as the first president of the company. He worked to improve sanitation practices in the nineteenth century, and lent his name to a hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Upon his death in 1910, he was succeeded in the presidency by his brother James Wood Johnson until 1932, and then by his son, Robert Wood Johnson II.
Robert Wood Johnson's granddaughter, Mary Lea Johnson Richards, was the first baby to appear on a Johnson & Johnson baby powder label. His great-grandson, Jamie Johnson, made a documentary called Born Rich about the experience of growing up as the heir to one of the world's greatest fortunes.
Read more about this topic: Johnson & Johnson
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)