From freezers to the breath of life

By SIMON COLLINS

A device to suck the air out of a cooking bag started Norma McCulloch on a path that has made her one of the world's top 10 female inventors.

It all started in about 1970 when home freezers were new on the market. Mrs McCulloch, a mother of two and wife of a Palmerston North railway worker, was employed by Fisher & Paykel "to show housewives how easy it was to freeze rather than bottle".

But it was not as easy as it sounded because the food got icy unless you sucked the air out of the freezer bag.

"It was a hell of a time trying to get the air out of the bag," she said.

"I saw my daughter blowing up her bicycle tyre and I thought, if you blow air in without electricity you can pull it out."

So she invented a vacuum pump. She asked Fisher & Paykel if they would mind "if I went into production with this product because the housewife needed it".

"I got a letter back saying, 'Go for your life Norma!' "

And she did. In 1975 she established McCulloch Products and moved it to Auckland to be nearer the market. She diversified from the vacuum pump into kitchen utensils.

In 1989 she handed the business over to her son, Richard, and bought a retirement place in Ruby Bay, near Nelson.

But just before she left Auckland, she was out with Richard when a woman "fell flat on her face for seemingly no reason" on the footpath ahead of them.

Richard, who had done a St John Ambulance course, gave the woman mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. At the time, there was a lot of publicity about Aids and hepatitis B being spread through blood.

"I was very proud of him, but I was also very worried. He's my only son," Mrs McCulloch said.

At Ruby Bay she could not stop thinking about it. She tried to buy a respirator that Richard could carry in his car in case of another emergency but they were hugely expensive. So she decided to invent a new one.

She talked to a lot of nurses and eventually came up with two plastic cylinders that suck up to 800ml of air into a person's mouth with a two-directional valve to let air out when the person starts breathing again.

"There is more oxygen in fresh air than there is in air we have already breathed in," she said.

"When you give mouth-to-mouth you are not blowing much because you are bent over, and a lot of the oxygen has been used."

Her new device was technically brilliant, and she sold a few to St John. But then the St John managers stopped it because they thought mouth-to-mouth was the quickest method.



But she was more successful with animals. She took it to Massey University and found that it was just what farmers needed to revive calves who were born with blocked airways. She sold the family house to raise money, developed another device to suck the mucous out first, and sold that with the respirator as a package.

In the decade since McCulloch Medical has sold more than 45,000 animal kits at around $100 each, 90 per cent of them exported.

And finally, about two years ago, new managers at St John accepted that the respirator was suitable for humans. In the past 18 months, 5000 human respirators, called Breath of Life, have been sold around the world.

Mrs McCulloch has been named one of the top 10 female inventors in the Global Women's Innovator and Inventor Awards in Britain.

After years of pouring all she owned into the business, she will celebrate her 70th birthday with her family in style at Chateau Tongariro, using the proceeds from selling the patent for the Breath of Life to a European company.