Finance History | One Johnson and Johnson Plaza — Fourteen People in a Wallpaper Factory

People treat Johnson and Johnson as a New Brunswick campus that later listed a consumer spinoff.

The first floor was rented from a wallpaper firm beside the railroad.

In January 1886 James Wood Johnson saw a for-rent sign on the former Janeway and Carpender factory from a Pennsylvania Railroad train stopped in New Brunswick.

He rented the top floor.

Robert Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson joined him.

The works opened in 1886 with fourteen employees, eight women and six men, making sterilized surgical dressings after Joseph Lister's antiseptic methods.

Frederick B. Kilmer became scientific director in 1889 and industrialized steam sterilization.

The sales office at the start sat at 32 Cedar Street in Manhattan. Manufacturing stayed here.

The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 24 September 1944.

The Credo was written in the same season as that offering.

The original tin-roofed factory does not survive as a public interior. Its plot remains inside the New Brunswick campus.

The present plaza is an active headquarters. The pin is the public edge of that campus, not a tour of the floors.

The mechanism is a rail-town factory that sold sterile gauze as a stock-in-trade, then sold equity a century later without leaving the city the train had chosen.

Photo: Daderot, public domain, Johnson and Johnson headquarters, via Wikimedia Commons.