David Sheridan, 95; Dropout Invented Key Medical Device

David S. Sheridan, dubbed the “catheter king” for his invention of the modern disposable catheter, has died. He was 95.

Sheridan, a grade-school dropout who held more than 50 patents on medical instruments, died Thursday at his home in Argyle, N.Y., of natural causes.

He helped found four companies and aided in building the Argyle and Glens Falls area of rural New York into what is considered the catheter capital of America. Selling the companies made him a multimillionaire, and he donated millions to local institutions, including the Glens Falls Hospital, which named its emergency room for him, and the Albany Medical Center, which named its MRI center in his honor.

In a 1988 article titled “Catheter King,” Forbes magazine said: “David Sheridan is a throwback to an earlier age when a man without a formal education could tinker and invent his way to a fortune, as Edison or Ford did.”

Born David Sokolof on July 10, 1908, in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents, he began doing odd jobs in his father’s floor finishing business at the age of 8. By 13, he was working full time, and at 22 he started his own flooring business.

By 1939, the year he changed his name to Sheridan, he took $35,000 in savings and started a catheter business with Norman Jeckel, a friend with a chemical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who wanted to make catheters out of resins he had developed.

Catheters -- tubes used in medical procedures to deliver medications and anesthesia and drain bodily fluids -- existed but were usually made in France and the approach of World War II threatened to cut off supplies. Then reusable, catheters were made of strands of cotton braided around piano wire molds, then varnished, heated, ground down and polished.

Within five years -- the span of the war -- the new catheter company was nationally recognized and posting $1 million in profits. But the partners quarreled and Sheridan was forced out.

He moved to a 120-acre farm in Argyle with his new wife, Janet, and turned the barn into his laboratory.

“I come up with good ideas,” he told Capital District Business Review in 1990. “I’ll sit down and think. Experiment.”

After the war, Sheridan heard about machines that could melt plastic pellets, and by extrusion, push out plastic forms. He bought one and soon produced plastic catheters so cheaply that they could be thrown away after a single use, reducing the risk of infection.

Later he developed wider ends to allow easy connection of catheters and, inspired by a striped soda straw, added a line of radioactive paint on catheters that was visible on X-rays.

In 1987, the man who never attended high school received an honorary doctorate in science from Albany Medical Center for his innovations in medical devices.

Sheridan, who worked until the age of 90, is survived by his wife, four children, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.