How a NASA Engineer Accidentally Invented The Greatest Summer Toy to Ever Toy

Ah, the Super Soaker. Combining the range and accuracy needed to act out your wildest action movie fantasies with safety and bonus cooling action, it is the ultimate toy for hot summer days. As far as toys go, the Super Soaker is fairly basic: a hand pump, a reservoir for water and compressed air, a trigger valve, and a nozzle. It isn’t exactly rocket surgery. Yet, surprisingly, it took an actual rocket scientist to invent this summertime staple and get it in the hands of children around the world. And, like many great inventions, it all started with a happy accident. This is the incredible and rather inspirational story of Lonnie Johnson and the unlikely creation of one of the all-time classic toys.

Lonnie George Johnson was born on October 6, 1949 in Mobile, Alabama, the son of a nurse’s aide and a Second World War veteran who worked as a truck driver at a nearby Army base. Johnson grew up at the dawn of the Civil Rights era, when much of the American South was still heavily segregated. Yet, as he later recalled:

“The people that I interacted with on a daily basis were primarily Black, my teachers were all Black, so racism and being treated unfairly was never a part of my daily activity or consideration.”

From an early age, Johnson was fascinated with mechanical devices, an interest eagerly cultivated by both his parents:

“My parents’ support was a big deal. I played with rockets when I was a kid. One day I was making some rocket fuel on top of the stove. It ignited and could have nearly burned the house down. Instead [of yelling] my parents got me a hot plate and said ‘do that kind of stuff outside.’”

Meanwhile, Johnson’s father taught him the basics of engine mechanics and electric circuits. Johnson applied this knowledge to building high performance go-karts out of scrap parts – earning him the nickname “The Professor” among his friends. Johnson’s first major engineering success, however, came in 1968 when he built a sophisticated robot he dubbed Linex:

“He was three-and-a-half-feet tall, had shoulders that could rotate and two arms with elbows and wrists that swiveled. He could pivot and move around on wheels.”

Johnson entered Linex in a Junior Engineering Science Fair held at the University of Alabama – the only student of a black high school in attendance:

“When we went to the University of Alabama, that was a totally different environment, everyone there was White except for us, and the fact that I was there with my robot to me was a victory in itself.”

But this was far from Johnson’s only victory, for his impressive creation easily won him first prize at the fair. Unfortunately, this was still the Deep South in the late 1960s, and despite Johnson’s clear potential, the University of Alabama showed little interest in helping him with his academic career. Instead, Johnson enrolled at the venerable Tuskegee University, his schooling underwriter by a Reserve Officers Training Corps or ROTC scholarship from the United States Armed Forces. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1975 and a Masters’ degree in nuclear engineering in 1975, Johnson went to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he worked on cooling systems for nuclear reactors. As he later recalled:

“I was working alongside a guy who had the same level of engineering I had, he had a master’s degree and he had graduated from Penn State and he was White, of course. And, it turns out, I was doing a better job than he was. Since then, I’ve always felt very good about my education at Tuskegee.”

Shortly thereafter, however, Johnson joined the United States Air Force to fulfill his end of the ROTC scholarship, heading the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. It was in 1979, while still in the Air Force, that Johnson obtained his first patent for a device he called the Digital Distance Measuring Instrument. This was a method of reading binary-encoded data that had been photographically miniaturized – the same basic principle used in CDs and DVDs. Yet, to Johnson’s continued regret, he never pursued the idea commercially:

“I refer to it as the big fish that got away, but I was patenting for fun back then. I was in the Air Force at the time and working on outer planetary space craft, including Galileo, and really enjoying my day job. I did think that was a really intriguing invention and that once I got the patent, the world would beat a path to my door, but it didn’t work out that way.”

Indeed, Johnson was enjoying a highly successful career, demonstrating again and again his impressive analytical and problem solving abilities:

“After I had done some analysis for the Air Force, I predicted some things that NASA had gone on record to say could not happen. I proved NASA’s prediction to be not totally accurate, that’s when I got offered the job at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and there I went to work on the Galileo spacecraft as a power systems engineer.”

While working on Galileo – an unmanned mission to study the planet Jupiter and its moons – Johnson developed a key power supply system for the spacecraft, but had to fight hard for it to be accepted

“It was an invention that my fellow engineers said would not work. I got that working, got that on the spacecraft, and many of them came up to me to apologize for the things they were saying about my idea … That to me was a major moral victory, to think, I’ve arrived, now I’m a real engineer.”

While working for NASA by day, by night Johnson tinkered with various personal projects. In 1982, Johnson was working on a new kind of heat pump that used water as its working fluid instead of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs like Freon – whose damaging effects on the ozone layer were just beginning to be recognized. One evening, after Johnson connected a prototype to his bathroom sink, a fateful accident occurred:

“I was experimenting with some nozzles that I machined, and I shot a stream of water across the bathroom and I thought, ‘Geez, maybe I should put this hard science stuff aside and work on something fun like a water gun. Maybe I could get enough money to support my habit.”

Just like that, the seeds of a billion-dollar idea were sown. But this project would have to wait, for that same year Johnson re-joined the air force and moved to Omaha Nebraska to work as a flight test engineer on a top secret project: the Northrop-Grumman B-2 Spirit or Stealth Bomber. Once established in Omaha, Johnson spent his evenings cobbling together prototype water guns from PVC pipe, plexiglass scraps, plastic soda bottles, and other assorted odds-and-ends. Surprisingly, this was not Johnson’s first experience with toy design; a few years earlier he had patented a small air-propelled aircraft called the Jammin’ Jet, which eventually hit store shelves in 1987. Unfortunately, partially due to a manufacturing defect, the product was not a success.

Johnson’s first inkling that he was onto something big came when he handed his prototype squirt gun to his 7-year-old daughter Aneka, who proceeded to gleefully soak every kid on the Air Force Base with 40-foot-long streams of water. In 1986, Johnson obtained U.S. Patent 4591071A for what he simply called a “Squirt Gun”, which, presaging later, more sophisticated toys, included both a battery and water-powered noisemaker that generated futuristic ray-gun sounds whenever the trigger was pulled. However, despite its seemingly obvious potential, Johnson faced a long, uphill battle getting his invention to market:

“At one point, I was trying to manufacture the product myself. One company I was working with went out of business. It soon became very clear to me that there was a lot more to understand about launching a company than I had realized. As a Captain in the military at the time, being an entrepreneur was not in my portfolio of experience. I figured there were people out there who made toys for a living and that I could learn a lot from them, so I decided to go the licensing route. I found Larami at the toy fair in New York City in 1989—it was a small toy company, but they were very interested in the innovative and high-performance features of the water gun and had engineers on staff that I could work with.”

At first, the representative from Larami – a Philadelphia-based firm best known for making cheap knockoff toys – was skeptical. But Johnson, following his personal maxim of “Put [an invention] on the table and let it stand on its merit,” simply pulled the prototype from his suitcase and proceeded to blast a stream of water across the convention hall. The representative was sold, and in 1990 Johnson’s invention hit the shelves under the name Power Drencher. Initial sales were excellent, and the following year the product was renamed the Super Soaker. This, coupled with a memorable television ad campaign, pushed sales through the roof. Over 2 million units were sold that year, making the Super Soaker the best selling toy of the 1991 summer season and the best-selling toy in the United States in 1992. The original Model 50 Super Soaker was soon followed by increasingly sophisticated models with all sorts of innovative features, including separate air tanks, electric water pumps, and constant-pressure systems – many based on Johnson’s designs. Some of his ideas, however, were less successful:

“I developed a system where after you’ve finished shooting the gun, you could just stick it into a pool of water or a bucket and press a button and it would automatically suck the water in and you’re good to go again. It was a quick refill, self-refilling water gun. That one really never made it to the market.”

Based on the success of the Super Soaker, Larami Toys was bought up by Hasbro in 1995. In all, more than 250 million Super Soakers have been sold since 1990, earning the popular water gun a spot in the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2015. Nearly as successful is Hasbro’s line of Nerf foam dart guns, which are also directly based on Lonnie Johnson patents. Indeed, this may well be Johnson’s earliest invention, for as a young boy he constructed small air guns out of bamboo and broom handles to shoot china berries at his friends. So if you grew up in the 90s or afterward, you owe a surprising amount of your childhood to Mr. Johnson.

Despite his extreme success here, rather than resting on his laurels and retiring to a tropical island filled with scantily clad women, in 1991 Johnson used his millions in Super Soaker and Nerf royalties to found Johnson Research and Development Co, Inc, where he would be free to pursue whatever projects he chose. Johnson’s current projects include next-generation ceramic and lithium batteries that can store 10 times as much energy as current battery technologies, a solar-powered moisture condenser for extracting water from the air in arid regions and where fresh water is scarce, and the Johnson Electrochemical Thermal Converter or JETC, a device that uses heat to directly generate electricity by compressing and expanding hydrogen. Far more efficient than similar converters, the JETC could one day generate large amounts of electricity from the low-grade waste heat emitted by power plants and other machinery. But Johnson’s creativity is wide-ranging, his 250 patents covering such diverse inventions as a wet diaper detector, portable multimedia projector system, and a hair drying curler. A veritable Edison of our time. (On this one, see our over 2 hour documentary Everything You Know About Edison and Tesla is Mostly Wrong)

In addition to his research and development work, Johnson is also a tireless advocate for black and other minority students entering the STEM fields, being heavily involved with nonprofits like For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology or FIRST, the Johnson Stem Activity Center or JSAC, 100 Black Men of Atlanta, and the Fernbank Science Centre. When asked about the secret to his own success in spite of the significant challenges he has faced, Johnson, now 74, is quick to emphasize one word:

“Perseverance is what I would stress for anyone interested in achieving anything significant. That includes learning the things you need to learn in order to overcome the obstacles that you face. It takes a lot of determination; you can’t give up when things get hard.”

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