If you build a better drumstick, the world will beat a path to your door.

That, more than 50 years ago, is precisely what Vic Firth did, in the process becoming, almost inadvertently, the world’s most prolific drumstick manufacturer.

Mr. Firth, who died on Sunday at 85, spent more than 40 years as the principal tympanist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, playing under a roster of distinguished conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Erich Leinsdorf and Seiji Ozawa.

During his tenure as the orchestra’s music director, Mr. Ozawa called Mr. Firth “the single greatest percussionist anywhere in the world.”

Mr. Firth, whom The Boston Globe, in a 2002 profile, called “debonair, affable, intelligent and sometimes cheerfully profane,” never planned to become a Stradivari of sticks. But by the early 1960s, after having played with the orchestra for a dozen years, he had grown frustrated with the drumsticks on the market, which, he realized, could not meet the demands of the full symphonic repertoire.