2024 is the 100th anniversary of Band-aids. But before they were the little strips in cool tins, they came in a roll you could cut to size.

Show Notes:

Johnson & Johnson history of Band-aids

Wikipedia: Band-aid history

Disposable America

The Atlantic: The Story of the Black Band-aid

TruColour Bandages

Transcript:

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton.

[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And I do have a cold.

[00:00:08] Speaker A: Yes.

[00:00:08] Speaker B: But today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about band aids.

[00:00:13] Speaker A: I want to know many things. Did you buy picturey ones for your children, or were you kind of scroogey?

[00:00:20] Speaker B: Here's the thing. I kind of felt like the picturey ones didn't have enough of the nick.

I'm a fan of the fabricy ones because I feel like they stay on better.

[00:00:32] Speaker A: Yeah, but.

[00:00:33] Speaker B: Okay, so, 2024, I just figured this out when I was doing research, is the 100th anniversary of the eponymous bandaid.

[00:00:40] Speaker A: Oh, so they've had them since the 20s?

[00:00:44] Speaker B: Yes.

I went to the Johnson and Johnson website for the history of the bandaid, and I stayed for a bandaid quiz.

[00:00:51] Speaker A: You can do a band. That's fun. I'll do any quiz.

[00:00:55] Speaker B: Same. I got 90%. But I may have done some research and also cheated.

I had already been looking into it, and then I took the quiz, and I was like, I'm so smart. No, it was all but way back in the late 19 hundreds when you.

[00:01:17] Speaker A: And I were young.

[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah, way back then, a million years ago, back with the mammoth. You could buy bandaids in a tin.

[00:01:25] Speaker A: Yes, you can again. Now they're, like $5 more than regular bandaids.

[00:01:30] Speaker B: I haven't seen that with the flip top lid.

[00:01:33] Speaker A: I walk down that row, I'm not even there for bandaids. I'm there for whatever else is in that row, and I'm like, I probably need four tins of these fancy bandaids.

[00:01:42] Speaker B: I don't know. But, I mean, that tin, it was just the right size to fit in, like, a shirt pocket. When I was a kid, you had, like, fishing supplies in there. It's almost like the cookie tin. That's actually a sewing kit.

[00:01:55] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.

[00:01:56] Speaker B: The number of times you could open that bandaid tin and it would not be bandaids was about 50 50.

[00:02:02] Speaker A: Yes. Gum. If it's nicely in there. Yeah.

[00:02:05] Speaker B: Okay, so the story of the bandaid. Let me take you back.

[00:02:09] Speaker A: Take me back.

[00:02:10] Speaker B: Back in 1920, Josephine Knight Dixon. Now, Johnson and Johnson says she was accident prone around the kitchen. I feel like she was a woman in the kitchen getting burns and cuts. That just happens.

[00:02:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Because the kitchen was a lot more dangerous in the. Yeah.

[00:02:26] Speaker B: Keep her away from the knives. But back then, we didn't have bandaids, so she would just wrap her fingers in a bit of spare fabric that she had lying know, and it would come untied and it would get dirty....

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