The Man, The Toy — Life After Grad

All my 90s babies, who are I guess you can say older now... anyways I know you remember back when toys were the big thing. For the new readers there was a time when kids didn’t know what a cell phone was, there was no Instagram, snapchat, tiktok, youtube, etc. We filled our time with actually being outside and playing with friends in person. I’m about to show my age but we had bop its, furbys, Tonka Trucks, skip its, socker boppers, and who could ever forget Super Soakers!!!! Super Soakers went through so many revisions and updates, it was equivalent to IPhone updates. With that the toy is still around, and has made billions of dollars. There had to be at least 2-3 in each household. The funny thing is it was actually a mistake when it was made.

Of course one of the greatest toys was created by a black inventor. Lonnie Johnson, a military vet, and NASA Engineer created the super soaker in 1982 a toy that would change the game, literally. So let’s backtrack a little bit and get some history. Johnson, born in Mobile, Alabama in 1949, was always intrigued by how things were made and loved to tinker. His dad taught him and his sibling at an early age how to make their own toys and from then on with his parent’s support his knack for inventing took off. He won a high school Science fair put on by University of Alabama’s Junior Engineering Technical Society that even more propelled his future. After graduating high school he went on to further his studies at Tuskegee University where he earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a M.S. in Nuclear Engineering. Johnson joined the Air force and left in 1979 to join NASA as a senior systems engineer. He later went back to the Air Force in 1982. While working at NASA he earned numerous awards for his work in spacecraft systems design. He worked on the Gallileo Mission (mission that sent a craft to study Jupiter). While at NASA, Johnson also tinkered with his own inventions outside of work. In 1982 while trying to perfect an environmentally friendly heat pump that used water instead of Freon, a test in his home bathroom with high pressure water shooting across it, lead to birth of the toy. After a few revisions, testing it with his daughter and her friends, the Power Drencher was born.

In 1989 Johnson formed his own engineering firm and licensed his most famous invention to Larami Corp. After a name change and marketing the now named Super Soaker went on to generate over 2million in retail sales in 2 years. Larami Corp was brought by HASBRO, a company that passed on the toy a few years before. Now President and founder of Johnson Research & Development Co. (a tech company with 3 spin-offs) Johnson holds over 100 patents with over 20 pending. He is currently working on JTEC, an engine that converts heat directly into electricity, and also a battery that uses glass that can hold the heat converted energy and would last a lot longer that lithium batteries.