In 1920, Earle Dickson had a problem. His newlywed wife, Josephine Frances Knight, was a disaster in the kitchen. She cut herself chopping vegetables. She burned herself on pots and pans. And every single day, Dickson—a cotton buyer at Johnson & Johnson—had to stop what he was doing to bandage her latest injury.

The existing solution was clunky: cut a piece of adhesive tape, cut a piece of cotton gauze, apply it to the wound, hope it stayed put. It didn't. Josephine's active fingers meant the bandages constantly fell off, requiring fresh applications multiple times a day.

Necessity, Meet Innovation

Dickson got creative. He took a long strip of surgical tape and placed small squares of gauze at intervals along it, covering the sticky parts with crinoline fabric to keep it sterile until needed. Now Josephine could simply cut off a section, peel back the covering, and bandage herself without assistance.

When Dickson showed his homemade bandage contraption to his bosses at Johnson & Johnson, they saw dollar signs. The company began mass-producing his design in 1921 under the name "Band-Aid"—a hyphenated combination that would become one of the most recognizable brand names in history.

From Kitchen Catastrophe to Cultural Icon

The first Band-Aids were three inches wide and eighteen inches long—users had to cut their own strips. Sales were terrible at first. Then Johnson & Johnson started giving them away for free to Boy Scout troops, and suddenly everyone wanted these magical self-adhesive bandages.

Dickson's career flourished alongside his invention. He rose through the ranks to become vice president of Johnson & Johnson before retiring in 1957, remaining on the board of directors until his death in 1961.

As for Josephine? History doesn't record whether she ever mastered accident-free cooking. But thanks to her culinary clumsiness, billions of people have had an easier way to deal with minor cuts and scrapes for over a century.

The takeaway: Sometimes the best inventions come from trying to solve one very specific, very personal problem. In this case, that problem just happened to be a wife who couldn't stop injuring herself while making dinner.

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