There were many skeptical responses and several false starts until finally in one toy manufacturer realized the potential for his drenching device. He licensed it to the Larami Corporation, which initially marketed the toy as the Power Drencher in It took some tweaking and rebranding until the toy took off. It has been one of the top toys sold every year since then and has spawned numerous brand extensions for drenching friends and family. His invention was a rarified breakthrough because of its success.
It ranks up there with the Slinky and Silly Putty. None of them were designed to be toys. Royalties from the Super Soaker and Nerf Blaster have enabled Johnson to pursue his dreams in a way he never imagined possible.
Born nearly 70 years ago in the segregated South, the African American inventor has had to prove himself as a talented and capable scientist. Born in Mobile, Alabama in , Johnson was naturally curious and his interest in science and technology was fostered by his father, an Army base truck driver , who taught him how electric currents work and how to repair household appliances.
One day I was making some rocket fuel on top of the stove. It ignited and could have nearly burned the house down. Together they built engines out of scrap parts and stuck them atop go-karts, while Johnson spent countless hours at home learning the basics of robotics. This was , in an Alabama still marked by segregation and open racism in all aspects of life. Linex was so impressive that they could not deny Johnson first place, a major accomplishment that also taught him something of a painful lesson: Despite creating an incredible robot out of scrap metal, no one from the University of Alabama showed interest in the academic future of such an obviously talented young scientist.
Then it was on to working for the Air Force to fulfill his end of the ROTC scholarship that the military branch had underwritten for his schooling.
Lonnie Johnson holding a Super Soaker and its U. Photo: Thomas S. At NASA, Johnson was part of the historic Galileo mission , which sent an unmanned craft to study Jupiter and the depths of space en route to the largest planet in the solar system. I related to the ladies because when I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory I was the only African-American on the systems engineering team for Galileo.
Johnson : After the jet propulsion lab, I went back into the military, and worked on my own inventions on the side. I got my first patent in before I left the Air Force. I called it the Digital Distance Measuring Instrument. It used ones and zeros and dots and dashes and a magnifying lens to read binary-encoded information from a scale that was photographically reduced.
Johnson : I call it the big fish that got away. I was enjoying my day job. Inventing was more of a hobby. Also I thought that once I got a patent, the world would beat a path to my door. But nobody knocked. I was working on a new heat pump that used water instead of Freon because Freon is bad for the environment.
I was having trouble getting people to understand the hard science inventions I had like a heat pump or the digital measuring instrument.
I thought the toy was something anyone could look at and appreciate. I had a number of false starts. Johnson : Initially I wanted to manufacture it myself and I talked to some companies that could handle that. I had spent my career in the military, so manufacturing and business were outside my bailiwick. Johnson : In I launched a successful toy, the Jammin Jet, powered by compressed air and water that would shoot out the back. It was made of Styrofoam and had a five-foot wingspan.
A company called Entertech made it but an engineer inside the company put the rudder at an angle so the plane would fly in a circle. I tried to convince him not to do that. It was all thanks to an accident. Read More. Maybe I could get enough money to support my habit," Johnson recalls. This wasn't the engineer's first foray into toy-making. He had been making toys since he was a kid. One of his earliest toy creations was building chinaberry guns with his friends using a mop and hollowed out bamboo tubing.
This would foreshadow a later very popular invention. Oh, did we mention that he also invented the Nerf gun? Super Soaker, of course, that entire line started as a result of my invention. Johnson considers himself a lifelong tinkerer. I built a go-cart, windmills, just a lot, rockets. He grew up in Alabama in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement.
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