Before the Second World War, Zbysław Roehr was a Polish industrialist. From 1939, he lived in the USA, where he founded a company producing medical equipment, including disposable needles, which conquered the American market. In 1964, the American Medical Association recognised the disposable needle as one of the most important innovations in the world of medicine of the past quarter century.
Zbyslaw Roehr was born in 1902 in Lwów (today’s Lviv), where he worked as director of the Community of Mining and Metallurgical Interests before the war. This was a corporation that was established in 1929. By the end of the 1930s it had become the largest mining and metallurgical enterprise in Poland, generating almost 40% of the total metallurgical production of the entire Second Republic. After Poland was occupied by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the German occupiers liquidated the Community and its assets were seized by German companies.
Roehr escaped to the USA at the end of 1939. There, in 1940, he founded The Roehr Products Company in Waterbury (state of Connecticut). It specialised in the manufacture of syringes and reusable injection needles. At an extremely fast pace, within three years it had risen to third place among US needle manufacturers.
Production of medical equipment continued uninterrupted until 1955, when Waterbury was hit by a flood. As it destroyed the production line, Roehr decided while rebuilding the plant to introduce what turned out to be key innovations.
Up to that point, the reusable needles he supplied to the market were made of stainless steel. It was embedded in a bronze holder, which was coated with nickel so that the bronze would not react with the drugs being applied. Such a needle came at a high price – costing between $2 and $3 apiece.
As Sławomir Łotysz, author of ‘Polish Inventors’, wrote, Roehr’s experiment involved replacing the nickel-plated bronze with cheaper aluminium. This reduced the cost of the syringe to 2.5 cents apiece, which was 70 times less than the reusable version. The innovative solution propelled Roehr’s company to second place on the list of the largest needle manufacturers in the US.
At the moment of his company’s greatest growth, i.e. in the late 1950s, Roehr decided to sell it: first the plant was acquired by the Brunswick Corp. and then by Sherwood Medical Industries.
Business activity did not hinder Roehr from being active amidst the Polish community. For that purpose, the Wanda Roehr Foundation – the industrialist’s wife – was established to support Polish inventors.