In 1920 Earle Dickson, a cotton buyer for Johnson & Johnson in Highland Park, New Jersey, watched his wife Josephine cut and burn her hands in the kitchen and wait for him to come home to dress the wounds, since gauze and surgical tape took two hands. He laid gauze down the middle of a strip of tape and covered it with crinoline so it could be rolled up and peeled open later. Johnson & Johnson branded it the Band-Aid, yet the 1921 version was a handmade strip 18 inches long and two and a half inches wide that users still had to cut, and first year sales were just 3,000 dollars.

The company turned it around by giving free bandages to the Boy Scouts of America, then built machines in 1924 to make small pre-cut strips. Sterilized bandages followed in 1939, the red pull string in 1940, and World War II put millions into military first aid kits. Dickson rose to vice president and stayed on the board until his death in 1961. In 2022 a consumer poll named Band-Aid the most trusted brand in the United States.

• Decorative designs began in 1956 with a stars and stripes pattern, and vinyl tape arrived in 1958
• The red string wrapper lasted until 1992
• Barry Manilow wrote the 1975 jingle I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, with the word brand there to protect the trademark
• Escalator, zipper and aspirin are former brand names that became generic words
• More than 100 billion Band-Aids have been made since the 1920 prototype