His story has the resonance of J.K. Rowling's. Between serving customers in an Edinburgh wine shop, Matt McGrath, a hard-up graduate, dreamt up ways to find backing for the lifesaving medical device he had designed at university.

Eight years later the invention by Mr McGrath, for use in emergency resuscitations, is taking the medical world by storm.

His video laryngoscope, which gives easy access to the throats of people who need to be intubated, is helping to save thousands of lives in 17 countries and has attracted £58million of orders.

With a single adjustable blade, a built-in camera and a LED display screen mounted on the handle, the $9,000 (£4,500) instrument is being described by accident and emergency consultants and anaesthetists as a tool that could revolutionise the global practice of intubation.

There are about 60 million such procedures carried out in the world every year, either in emergency cases needing resuscitation, or in any procedure requiring anaesthetic.

“The McGrath represents the most significant advancement in laryngoscope design since the 1940s,” Gary Enever, a consultant anaesthetist from Newcastle upon Tyne, said.

Consultants in the US enthuse about the ease with which they can use the instrument on difficult cases involving obese, high-risk patients with other complications such as heart weakness. Some have described occasions when its handiness meant that they got oxygen to a dying patient and saved a life.

Laryngoscopes are used to open up the passage in the throat to the lung, avoiding the vocal cords, to allow oxygen to be put in. Intubation, Mr McGrath said, was similar to the task of retrieving a ball from a bush. You put one arm in to hold back the branches then reached for the ball with the other arm.

His device plays the part of the first arm, allowing access for oxygen to follow. Previously laryngoscopes were heavy, crude devices with a set of different-sized blades. The lack of a camera meant that a certain amount of brute force, especially in emergency situations, was needed.

Mr McGrath, 30, said that he had no idea what a laryngoscope was in 1999 when, as a design student in Newcastle, he entered the Royal Society of Arts design awards. The brief that year was to design a laryngoscope. “I went and stood outside hospitals and talked to the paramedics when the ambulances came in,” Mr McGrath, a design entrepreneur, who was educated in Benbecula and at Kingussie High School, said.

“They showed me how it worked - and how, with the traditional one, you had to wrench the patient's anatomy fairly brutally in order to get it down the throat.

“So I went away and designed one that had a more extreme curve, to get round the corner of the throat, and more importantly had a camera so you could see where you were going.”

His design won the RSA design award, following in the footsteps of Jonathan Ive, head of design at Apple, and the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood.

After graduating, Mr McGrath moved to Edinburgh with a prototype but no money to develop it. He received grants and loans from the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust in 2002 and 2003 and the Audi Design Foundation.

At the beginning of last year Aircraft Medical, Mr McGrath's company, began to attract the attention of the US hospital market. European demand for his product has boomed in the past six months. He has a five-year order book for £58 million.

The precision manufacturing is done at Dalgety Bay, Fife, and Mr McGrath employs 20 full-time staff, with another 80 indirectly.

He is now exploring the redesign of other devices used in critical care.

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