The disposable syringe, the silent burglar alarm, the childproof medical bottle and the animal tranquilliser dart — all were invented by Colin Murdoch. His inventions have had a beneficial impact on the lives of millions of people, though did little to enrich Murdoch himself. He held more than 40 patents, spinning off ideas in every direction from his training as a pharmacist and veterinary surgeon.

Colin Albert Murdoch was born in 1929 in Christchurch, New Zealand, to Frank Murdoch, a pharmacist, and his wife, Mary. Dyslexic, he largely struggled at school but he excelled at drawing and chemistry. To the alarm of his parents, he was making gunpowder before he reached double figures, and at the age of 10 he scared them further by creating the acid ignition muzzle-loading gun. The gun, which worked with a wick and hammer, was based on Murdoch’s observation that certain nitrates will cause an ignition when mixed with sulphuric acid. Murdoch, who went on to study firearms all his life, said that he never saw another operate on the same principle.

Brought up in rural South Canterbury, Murdoch, aged 13, owned and drove, illegally,a Morris Oxford Tourer. After school he studied at the College of Pharmacy in Wellington. Following his father he went on to do a five-year apprenticeship to become a pharmacist. As well as his concern for people (in his early teens he was awarded the Royal Humane Society Medal for saving a drowning man), Murdoch had an interest in the welfare of animals that in part stemmed from his bucolic upbringing.

His most important invention, the disposable syringe, was a result of his twin vocations — he wanted to make a more efficient vaccinator for animals and was also very conscious of the risks of passing infections from one patient to the next (whether human or animal) when using the same syringe. Disposable glass syringes were being developed at the end of the 1940s, spurred in the US by a drive to immunise children against polio. Drugs companies, concerned by the possibility of litigation surrounding infections passed on by their products, were looking into other options.

Murdoch invented his plastic syringe in 1956, a now-ubiquitous design of which millions are used every day. At first it met resistance, however, with the New Zealand Department of Health expressing the view that it was unnecessary and that it would be spurned by the public for being too futuristic. This short-sightedness failed to account not only for the difficulties in effectively sterilising glass syringes but also for the sharp increase in the use of injected drugs that took place in the 1950s. Murdoch was 26 when he received his first patent for the syringe in 1956 and over the next 15 years he invented numerous variations — such as variable-dose syringes, self-filling syringes and syringe darts — which were all significantly different and all breakthroughs in pharmaceutical delivery.

Another of Murdoch’s breakthrough inventions was the tranquilliser gun. He was working with colleagues studying wild goat and antelope populations in New Zealand when it occurred to him that the animals would be far easier to catch if they could be sedated from afar. In 1959 he received a patent for the automatic syringe projectile, an invention that greatly reduced the stress experienced by captured animals. He refined the idea by developing a syringe pistol with a valve that allowed the shooter to control the velocity of the dart. In 1979 the gun was used on a human being when a man in Auckland took his wife hostage. Talking to a police marksman by telephone, Murdoch could tell him where to shoot the hostage-taker and at what setting to have the gun’s velocity.

Murdoch’s developments in the field of animal tranquillisation went farther than mere delivery. In the 1950s, when he was developing his guns, the only tranquilliser drugs available were curare — a dart poison developed from recipes by Native Indians in South America — and nicotine alkaloids, all of which caused fatal reactions in a high proportion of the animals subjected. Murdoch worked with leading drugs companies to help to develop more sophisticated drugs with more predictable reactions. He also noted that the huge surge in adrenalin experienced by animals that feel threatened — which can result in shock and death — could be made manageable by administering an electrolyte solution immediately after immobilisation. This has saved the lives of millions of human accident victims, as it is now routine practice to give such a solution to the young and elderly to prevent shock during surgery.

In 1966 Murdoch invented the silent burglar alarm, which worked by triggering a phone call to the police if an intruder was detected. He also received a patent for an automatic fire detector that, on the same principle, alerted the fire brigade when heat sensors were activated. Plans for production never went ahead (Murdoch was told by the authorities that the device would interfere unacceptably with the phone system), although the device has been taken up elsewhere.

A decade (and 17 patents) later, at the 1976 World Inventors Fair in Brussels, he won a gold medal for his patented child-proof medicine bottle. He won two more gold medals for other inventions at the fair, as well a bronze.

Murdoch attributed most of his ideas to his sleeping hours. He would awake in the night from dreams of objects spinning before him in three dimensions and go to his kitchen table to capture them with pencil and paper before their memory dissolved away.

While Murdoch owned the patents for a great many products which resulted from these reveries, he failed to become significantly rich, although he headed Paxarms, a successful company developing, making and selling tranquilliser guns. “Patents give you the right to sue, they don’t give you the money to sue,” he once told a New Zealand newspaper, but he also later said that patent lawyers would frequently inform him that patents of his were being broken but that he declined to take action, satisfied simply knowing that the original idea was his.

In 1999 Time magazine named him one of the top 100 Most Influential People of the South Pacific, but he largely lived unhymned.

Colin Murdoch, pharmacist, veterinarian and inventor, was born on February 6, 1929. He died of cancer on May 4, aged 79