Dr. Forrest M. Bird, an eccentric aviator and inventor who studied high-altitude breathing problems of World War II pilots and later created medical devices that saved lives and aided thousands of people with respiratory ailments, died on Sunday at his home in Sagle, Idaho. He was 94.

His stepdaughter, Rachel Schwam, confirmed his death.

When the fraternity of inventors celebrate the geniuses who came up with super glue, kitty litter and the cellphone, they sometimes talk about Dr. Bird, an American original who began tinkering with gizmos concocted out of strawberry-shortcake tins and doorknobs and eventually developed four generations of cardiopulmonary devices that came to be widely used in homes and hospitals.

In the 1950s and ’60s, he pioneered some of the first portable and reliable mechanical ventilators for people with acute and chronic heart and lung afflictions. These relatively small devices, used in all but the worst cases, made primitive and expensive mechanisms like the iron lung virtually obsolete only a decade after hospital wards had been lined with them at the height of paralytic polio epidemics.

Dr. Bird was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1995 for developing the first low-cost, mass-produced pediatric respirator, known as the Baby Bird, which has been credited by medical experts with significantly reducing the mortality rates of infants with respiratory problems.