N.Y. State Region Owes Prosperity to Inventor : Medicine: David Sheridan’s patents helped create jobs in New York area known as ‘America’s Catheter Capital.’

It’s not as dashing as “Silicon Valley” or as majestic as “Motor City.” But this farming region south of the Adirondacks is proud nonetheless to carry the nickname “America’s Catheter Capital.”

With six plants devoted to the slender plastic tubes, catheters mean jobs to about 3,500 workers in the area. The only other major employer is the faltering paper industry.

If you’ve had a catheter navigated down your throat, veins or . . . um . . . elsewhere as part of a medical exam or to drain fluids, it’s even money that it was made in this region.

“You know, I always refer to this area as the Catheter Capital of the World,” boasts Francis O’Keefe, mayor of Glens Falls, a city of 15,000.

How Glens Falls gained this distinction is largely the story of David Sheridan, a man with a grammar school education but a knack for designing catheters and for business.

Like Henry Ford, another tireless tinkerer with little schooling, Sheridan changed an entire industry, becoming a millionaire along the way. At age 85, he’s running his fourth catheter company and has more than 50 patents to his name.

“This is my cup of tea,” said Sheridan, fiddling with a prototype for a tracheal tube during a recent interview in an office filled with catheters. A bouquet of tracheal tubes was splayed in a can on his desk.

“It’s an instinct,” he says of his knack for the business. “I can’t explain it.”

To others, he’s something of a hero.

“Dave Sheridan has saved the lives of millions worldwide by making surgery safer,” said Dr. Ralph Alley, a retired thoracic surgeon at Albany Medical Center and adviser to Sheridan on some designs. Alley said Sheridan has contributed greatly to making catheters more reliable.

Sheridan didn’t plan to be the Catheter King.

In the 1930s, he had a floor refinishing business in Westchester County when a friend persuaded him to put up his $35,000 in savings to begin a new catheter company in Queensbury, about 50 miles north of Albany.

Business at the U.S. Catheter and Instrument Corp. thrived, in part because France--then the main U.S. supplier of catheters--got caught up in World War II.

Sheridan left the company in 1945 following a run-in with his partner and bought a farm in nearby Argyle. But by 1953, he was tinkering with catheter designs again, this time in a red barn in Argyle he converted into a workshop. Sheridan had a mission: build a better urethral catheter.

Until about World War II, urethral catheters were usually made of braided cotton strings that resembled shoelaces, then repeatedly laminated. And they were used repeatedly.

“I always had the idea that a catheter shouldn’t be used any more than one time,” he said.

Through trial and error, he built a machine that made plastic catheter tubes.

Later, he figured out a way to produce plastic catheters with wider ends, which are useful for funneling purposes or for connecting to other tubes. And, inspired by striped drinking straws, he put a line of radioactive paint down a catheter that would show up on X-rays.

At the start, Sheridan successfully used parts from washing machines, dough mixers, bicycles and sewing machines for his newfangled machines.

Sheridan sold his second successful company to Sherwood Medical in 1959, then built up yet a third and sold that one to Mallinckrodt Medical in 1974. He started his fourth, Sheridan Catheter Corp., in 1982 at the age of 73. And his first, U.S. Catheter and Instrument, still thrives.

Also producing catheters in the area are Namic U.S.A. Corp., begun by a former area salesman for Sheridan, and Angio Dynamics Division of E-Z EM.

The area’s six companies provide about a third of the manufacturing jobs in the Glens Falls area, said Martin Fairclough, president of the Warren Washington Regional Economic Development Corp.

Together, the plants produce almost every kind of catheter that can be found under the skin--from those used in cardiology, radiology and angioplasty to others used in urology.

Sheridan, meanwhile, still works more than five days a week in his search for a better catheter.

“I’ll play around, look at it,” he says of his inventing technique. “I keep thinking about it.”