Ben Franklin's inventions: Flexible Urinary Catheter

Flexible Urinary Catheter

In Franklin's day, catheters (tubes inserted through the urethra into the bladder to drain urine from the body) were rigid and quite painful. Franklin devised a catheter with a flexible tube. John, Ben's older brother, suffered from kidney stones, and so Ben found a way to ease some of the disconfort for his brother.