March 26, 1845: A Sticky Application for an Old Problem

On March 26, 1845, a patent was awarded for an adhesive medicated plaster, the precursor of the Band-Aid. From the article:

"March 26, 1845: A Sticky Application for an Old Problem
__1845: __Drs. Horace Harrell Day and William H. Shecut receive patent No. 3,965 for an adhesive medicated plaster, in other words, a wound dressing that stuck on its own. It was the forerunner of the Band-Aid.

Samuel Gross had reported on using adhesive medicated plasters in a Philadelphia medical journal in 1830. Day and Shecut's innovation was to dissolve rubber in a solvent and then paint it on fabric. After obtaining a patent for the improved process, they sold the rights to Dr. Thomas Allcock, who sold it under the name Allcock's Porous Plaster.

Dr. John Maynard advanced the idea in 1848. His plaster involved taking fluid derived from gun cotton (explosive, highly nitrated nitrocellulose) dissolved in sulfuric ether (regular, diethyl ether in modern parlance) and brushing it on the skin. Then you covered it with cotton strips. Not exactly convenient or portable.

Robert Wood Johnson and George J. Seabury came up with an improvement in 1874 that would hang on for more than a century. They developed a medicated adhesive plaster with a rubber base. Johnson left Seabury and set up a partnership in 1885 with his own brothers. That company became Johnson & Johnson.

The Johnson brothers' factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, shipped antiseptic surgical dressings to doctors and hospitals. The dressings were made of cotton and gauze and were individually wrapped. The company soon perfected a technique to sterilize the bandages, which it also applied to catgut sutures for surgery.

It wasn't until 1920 that J&J created its most famous product. Earle Dickson, a newlywed employee, wanted a simple dressing for his klutzy wife, who was suffering a lot of cuts and burns in the kitchen. Dickson pre-assembled patches of gauze on adhesive tape for her. He showed the idea to his employer, and soon the company was marketing the Band-Aid for consumer use.

Source: Everybody's Business (Moskowitz, Levering and Katz), The People's Almanac (Wallechinsky & Wallace)."