In 1886, three brothers founded Johnson & Johnson in a former wallpaper factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with a simple mission: bring antiseptic surgery to the masses. The company they built would become one of the most trusted names in American health care. A century later, the name would become equally associated with one of the largest product liability battles in U. S.
history, with tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging its baby powder caused cancer. Robert Wood Johnson, a pharmaceutical wholesaler, attended the International Medical Congress in Philadelphia in 1876 and heard British surgeon Joseph Lister present a three-hour lecture on antiseptic technique. At the time, most surgeons operated in unwashed coats, used unsterilized instruments, and dismissed the idea that invisible organisms could cause infection, a resistance that contributed to staggering death tolls during the Civil War. Johnson saw the potential to save lives on a massive scale, but it took a decade for his brothers, James and Edward Mead Johnson, to join him in launching the company in 1886.
The firm’s first product line was ready-to-use sterile surgical dressings, sold in sealed packages for the first time. To convince skeptical physicians, the brothers published a free manual on sterile surgical technique in 1888, distributing 85,000 copies. By 1894, the company employed over 400 people in 14 buildings, and it later introduced the first commercial first aid kits and maternity kits. The famous Band-Aid came from a kitchen-table invention in 1920, when cotton buyer Earl Dixon, tired of his wife Josephine cutting herself while cooking, created a ready-to-apply adhesive bandage.
After a slow first year, the company gave them free to Boy Scout troops, and parents began asking for them at stores. The Band-Aid became a household staple by the 1920s. Robert Wood Johnson II, known as “the General,” took over as president in 1932 and built the company into a global health care corporation. In 1943, he wrote the company’s Credo, which prioritized doctors, patients, mothers, and employees above stockholders.
He died in 1968, leaving the bulk of his $400 million estate to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His younger brother, J. Seward Johnson, had an entirely different legacy. In his later years, he married Barbara Piasecka, a Polish chambermaid 42 years younger, after divorcing his second wife.
When he died in 1983, his six children were almost entirely cut out of his $400 million estate. The result was one of the longest and most expensive inheritance battles in American history, lasting 17 weeks, with over 200 lawyers and legal fees exceeding $24 million. The case ended in a settlement that gave his widow roughly $340 million, while the children split about $42 million. During the litigation, a lawsuit from his daughter Mary Lee included allegations that Seward had sexually abused her as a child, an accusation the family disputed, and she maintained until her death in 1990.
The family’s private life became tabloid material in later generations. In 2010, Casey Johnson, a great-great-granddaughter of the founder and an heir to the family fortune, was found dead in her Los Angeles home after stopping her insulin. She was 30 years old. She had been estranged from her father, Woody Johnson, who later became the owner of the New York Jets and U.
S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Donald Trump. The company’s most famous crisis came in September 1982, when seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide. The tampering occurred after the bottles left Johnson & Johnson factories, and the killer was never found.
CEO James Burke ordered a nationwide recall of all Tylenol, removing 31 million bottles at a cost of $100 million, despite FBI and FDA advice for a limited regional recall. The company re-released the product with new triple-sealed tamper-evident packaging, which became the FDA-mandated industry standard. Tylenol recovered its market share within a year, and Burke won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The same company that took that public-spirited stand now faces more than 67,000 lawsuits over its talc-based baby powder.
Documents from as early as 1957 showed asbestos contamination in talc from its Italian suppliers. Between 1972 and 1975, three different laboratories hired by the company found asbestos in its talc, including one test describing levels as “rather high,” according to Reuters reporting. Johnson & Johnson has maintained its cosmetic talc never contained asbestos and was safe, but a 2018 Reuters investigation found internal documents showing executives and scientists had known about the contamination for decades and never informed the public. In 2016, a jury awarded $72 million to the family of a woman who died of ovarian cancer after decades of using the powder.
In 2018, 22 women won a $4. 69 billion judgment, later reduced to $2. 1 billion on appeal. In October 2019, FDA testing found asbestos in a bottle of the powder, prompting a recall of 33,000 bottles.
The company discontinued its talc-based baby powder in North America in 2020 and worldwide in 2023. Instead of settling the claims, Johnson & Johnson created a subsidiary called LTL Management, transferred its talc liabilities to that shell company, and had it file for bankruptcy, a tactic nicknamed the “Texas two-step. ” A federal appeals court rejected it in 2023, and a second attempt was also dismissed. In 2024, the company tried a third time through a new subsidiary, Red River Talc, offering $8 billion to settle all ovarian cancer claims.
That effort failed in March 2025. In December 2025, a Baltimore jury awarded $1. 5 billion to a single plaintiff who developed mesothelioma after using baby powder for more than four decades. The Johnson family story offers a parallel arc.
Builders who wanted to save lives, heirs who struggled with addiction and tragedy, and a company that once recalled every bottle in America over a safety fear, yet spent decades fighting over test results that showed asbestos in a product used widely by parents, women, and communities of color. The company’s founding purpose was to fight infection and protect the vulnerable. The same name stands over hospitals, foundations, and 67,000 lawsuits.
The question of what was known about the powder, and when, remains tied up in courts and bankruptcy proceedings.