History is full of inventions made because of pure accidents that made the world a better place and often made millionaires of very mediocre people who might have never thought of making enough money to pay off even their debts.
And the story of how Band-Aid came into being is one such story.
Cuts, scratches, and bruises are parts of our life. Thankfully, so is Band-Aid. In the present context, whenever we have a cut, the first thing that comes to our mind is Band-Aid and for sure it is a great quick relief and fix.
But despite the fact that we cannot imagine the world without Band-Aid, there was a time when there wasn’t Band-Aid and the story of how it came into existence, is quite a cute and interesting one.
Earle Dickson was recently married to Josephine Knight and was much in love with her. He worked for a company that manufactured gauze and adhesive tape as a cotton buyer.
For some reason we might never know, or perhaps that a divine intervention was at work, his dear new wife was extremely prone to injuries.
She cut herself twice during the first week of their marriage while using the kitchen knife and she went on cutting herself again and again. There seemed to be no end of her tragedies. It appeared as if her condition was going from bad to worse.
Her husband, Earle, noticed that the gauze and tape that his wife would apply on her fingers would fall off after some time due to the domestic works and to save his wife of the trouble, he developed an idea.
One fine day, he sat down with some tape, gauze and a pair of scissors and started cutting the tape in strips. He stuck a square of gauze in the middle of each strip so that if his wife cut herself again, she might use a ready-made bandage quickly without much fuss. He made plenty of such bandages and kept them ready for his accident-prone wife. And these bandages would not fall off.
The company he was working for, Johnson & Johnson heard about the bandage that Earle was making for his wife that she could wear in less than thirty seconds comparing to those bandages where one needed to put gauze over the cuts and apply tape over the gauze separately.
The company soon adopted the idea and started making them in small scale for sale. The idea didn’t gain much popularity in the beginning and could sell only $ 3,000 worth of the product. But four years later in the year 1924, the new bandage kicked off and the company had to install machines for mass production of the bandage to meet the demands and the trade name BAND-AID was adopted.
Earle Dickson, the primary inventor of the product was made the vice-president of the company and was also given a seat on the board of directors.
The sales of Band-Aid today exceed $ 30,000,000 per year and more than a hundred billion units of the product is produced each year and it is all thanks to a woman who kept meeting accidents and a loving husband who stuck some gauze on a tape because he was determined to help his new wife he was so much in love with.