Credited to New Zealand. Not shown in the sources seen: other disposable syringe designs were patented in the United States around the same period, so sole priority is uncertain.
How it began
Colin Murdoch trained as a pharmacist and opened a pharmacy in Timaru, New Zealand, in 1954. He was working on a new vaccinator for animals when, by his account, the cap of his fountain pen on a flight in 1952 suggested a needle and plunger in a single pre-filled, throwaway unit. He patented his first plastic syringe design in 1956.
No manufacturer handed him the means to make it. Murdoch taught himself plastics engineering and designed and built the molding tools for his first disposable syringes.
Before it existed
Syringes of the time were made of glass or steel. They were expensive, so each one was sterilized and used again on many patients, which carried a risk of passing infection from one person or animal to the next. Doctors giving antibiotics had also begun to notice that the drugs left a crystal deposit inside glass syringes that made them hard to sterilize.
How it spread
Murdoch marketed his syringes internationally through Tasman Vaccine Laboratories, an Australian-owned company based in Upper Hutt. Variants followed, including pre-filled and self-filling syringes and, from 1959, a syringe dart fired from a tranquilizer gun for immobilizing animals. By the late 1970s the United States alone was using an estimated 2.5 billion disposable syringes a year.
Who pushed back
Murdoch took the idea to officials at the New Zealand Department of Health, who turned it down. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography records their reason as a belief that no one would want to be injected with something made of plastic. A trade history of the invention quotes the response as calling it too futuristic.
He also lost the commercial contest. Large drug companies took up the idea after his patents appeared in international gazettes, and he did not have the money to enforce them. "Patents give you the right to sue, they don't give you the money to sue," he said.
What lasted
Single-use syringes removed reuse as a routine path for cross-infection and made injections cheaper to deliver at scale. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography credits the design with saving millions of lives by limiting the spread of fatal diseases. Murdoch received no financial reward for it. He held 46 patents by the time he sold his tranquilizer gun business in 1978, was appointed to the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2000, and died in Timaru in 2008.
