John L. Naughton 1915-1999; 1996 bio
NAUGHTON
Posted By: Gary Lillis (email)
Date: 8/6/2003 at 23:36:23
reprinted with permission from Iowa Pride by Duane A. Schmidt
John L. Naughton
Invented sit-down dentistry
The next time you see your dentist sitting by your side, thank Iowan John Naughton. Your dentist does. Here's why.
Few professional revolutions have been spurred by a single person, especially by an outsider to the profession. fortunately, John Naughton didn't know that.
John was raised on a farm near Williamsburg and always had a knack for people relationships. After high school, John found a variety of selling jobs, finally landing in Des Moines as a shoe distributor for the Niagara Massage company. John then combined the Niagara Massage unit into a chair he called the Comfa-Lounge*, which he sold to the stressed professional people as the ideal way to relax after a hard day at the office.
John displayed his chairs at professional conventions, including the Iowa Dental Convention where he offered a moment's respite to weary conventioneers. Two of his dentist customers, Dr Bernard "Barney" Morgan of Britt, Iowa, and Dr. Meigs Jones of Kansas City, cornered John and asked him to build a chair as comfortable for patients as the one for the visitors to the convention. John thought that sounded interesting.
He constructed a crude prototype of what he thought a dentist chair should be. The chairs of the day were monstrous metal frames, upon which a pair of rock-hard seat and back cushions were fixed. Dentists stood by these thick chairs and leaned awkwardly against them in working positions. John built his chair and took it to Barney Morgan's dental office to see it in use.
John sat in the hallway all morning, watching the tall Dr. Morgan work with even greater discomfort than with his old upright chair. But Dr. Morgan knew his patients loved the new chair and he asked how soon he could get another. John parried that question and went back to his shop to make a chair that comforted both the patient and dentist.
John next plowed through a blizzard to Kansas City to show the concept to the nationally known Jones. This second chair had an upper iron infrastructure that allowed the patient to be lowered into a reclined position. Dr. Jones loved the chair and the next day the Kansas City Star carried a feature on the novelty of the dental patients lying down in a dental office.
John went home and formed the Den-Tal-Ez* dental chair manufacturing company, and began a scramble for dentist recognition. At first, dental supply houses refused to show and sell this strange chair.
But an even greater problem was the resistance John encountered with dentists entrenched in the stand-up concept of dentistry.
Backed by John, teams of salespeople fanned out across the nation teaching dentists the new technique of "four-handed-dentistry," which counted the two hands of the doctor and the two hands of his ever-present assistant.
When dentists objected tp patients lying flat while they worked, saying that materials would drop down the patient's throats, John who had no medical training-pointed out that the throat closes when a person is supine. The doctors were amazed to learn that truth from John.
In just a few years, John's chair became the most popular chair in dental history. And the sit-down dental concept John invented became entrenched as the standard of care in the profession.
Studies have shown that dentists who work sitting down live 17 per cent longer than dentists who worked standing up. That just gives those dentists a few more years to extend profound thanks to the outsider who changed dentistry, four-handedly.
Born: October 22, 1915, Williamsburg, Iowa.
Died: October 24, 1999
Buried: St. Mary Cemetery, Williamsburg. IowaEducated: Parnell Iowa, High School.
Family: Mary Delores, wife, Mary, Jeanne, daughters, Thomas, Michael, Sons
Iowa connection: born, raised, schooled, worked, invrented and lived in Iowa.
Honors: Certificate of Recognition, Minnesota State Dental Association. E award from the President of the United States for excellence in manufacturing and export. 1982 Honoree of the Iowa Regional National Conference of Christians and Jews for distingushed human relations and community service. 1982, Original and 100,000th Den-Tal-Ez* chairs placed in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. 1989, inducted into the Iowa Inventors Hall of Fame.
reprinted with permission from Iowa Pride, copywright 1996 Duane A. Schmidt all rights reserved
Iowa Pride is available in paperback at Gentle Dental, Cedar Rapids Iowa
John L. Naughton's gravesite
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