Robert Johnson, a pharmacist from Brooklyn, New York, and partner in a Brooklyn pharmaceutical supply firm invented the Band-Aid.
They believed that individually sealed sterile bandages could drastically reduce the rate of hospital infections, which in some cases ran to 90 percent.
By the mid-1800s, he and his brothers formed a pharmaceutical company that produced and sold the bandages to hospitals.
In 1920, a company employee, Earle Dickson, devised small sterile bandages for his wife’s minor injuries.
Band-Aids eventually became the standard for do-it-yourself dressings.