The Band Aid to heal from wonds is now 100 years old. Johnson and johnson introduce Band Aid in the year of 1920.  The Earle Dickson in Highland Park, New Jersey for his wife Josephine, who frequently cut and burned herself while cooking. The prototype allowed her to dress her wounds without assistance. Dickson passed the idea on to his employer, which went on to produce and market the product as the Band-Aid. Dickson had a successful career at Johnson & Johnson, rising to vice president before his retirement in 1957. Perhaps a curiosity, the word “Band” in German means tape.

Dickson brought home a cache of antiseptic cotton gauze and surgical adhesive tape, which were made by Johnson & Johnson as part of the company’s suite of sterile surgical products. He took a strip of tape that was 18 inches long by 3 inches wide, and laid a slightly narrower piece of gauze lengthwise down the middle. He then covered the surface with a crinoline fabric to keep it from sticking to itself, and folded up the whole thing into a neat roll that his wife could keep at the ready.

Trade Mark

Band-Aid arguably has, over time, become a genericized trademark in the United States, and a generic term cannot function as a trademark; but Johnson & Johnson has registered Band-Aid as a trademark on the Principal Register of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the registration is valid and legal.A registration on the Principal Register does not create ownership rights under the laws of the United States, and a registration may be challenged and removed if the challenger proves as a matter of fact that the alleged trademark has become generic.

To protect the name, their trademark, Johnson & Johnson always refers to its products as “BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages”, not just “Band-Aid”.