In his life he’s been a kid who nearly burned his house down trying to cook up rocket fuel, a NASA engineer, and a man who made your childhood a goddamn delight through his mastery of hydraulics and water guns.
Today’s Moment of Science… living legend, Lonnie G. Johnson.
I’ve gotten used to reading and researching these stories and finding a catch somewhere, that after a long career of doing amazing things that changed the world, you find out someone holds truly fucked up beliefs. Or they stole their seminal research. Or some combination of the above.
(Hey Watson. Hey Crick.)
Yeah, today there’s just good news because Lonnie Johnson is probably the best human that there hasn’t been an HBO mini-series about. Consider this my request for the Chernobyl guy to get on it.
Johnson was always a smart, curious, and at times precocious child nicknamed ‘the professor.’ His father had been a handyman without much formal education, but he was highly skilled. He taught Lonnie and his five siblings the basics of how electricity worked and how to make their own toys. Shit got creative. He constructed a pressurized chinaberry cannon using bamboo shoots. Then there was the time he tried to saute up some rocket fuel in a sauce pan and, to the surprise of nobody reading this, even DIY rocket fuel can explode. Then there was the time he built a lawnmower engine into a go-kart, and decided to take it for a joyride on the highway.
He was thirteen. Legend.
As a Black child born in Mobile, Alabama in 1949, he went through the trappings of a segregated school system, attending an all-Black high school. In 1968, his senior year of high school, he entered the Alabama state science fair. The event was held at the University of Alabama, a location with some history. Five short years before, racist piece of shit Governor George Wallace tried to stop two Black students from enrolling at the school by blocking the entrance. But now, with a robot he built from scraps that was powered by compressed air, the only Black student who entered the competition won first prize. Between that win and his grades, he headed to Tuskegee University on scholarship.
He got his bachelors in mechanical engineering followed by a masters in nuclear engineering. He went from ROTC in college to the Air Force full time after graduation, eventually rising to the rank of captain. He had a specialized role in overlooking nuclear power systems used in space launches.
In 1979, he moved to Pasadena for his first of two stints working as a senior systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He worked on the nuclear power source for the Galileo Jupiter Probe, returning in 1987 to work as the fault projection engineer for the Cassini project to Saturn. He also worked on the Mars Observer project, just to be sure he was sending work to all corners of the solar system.
In 1982, he’d returned to work for the Air Force, during which time his big idea started to marinate. He was trying to sort out a heat pump that worked with water instead of the o-zone depleting freon in his spare time, as you do. When water shot out of a high pressure nozzle like a goddamn geyser against his bathroom wall during an experiment, he thought ‘maybe the toy water gun business is for me.’ He made a prototype for his six year old daughter who, I assume, was the most adorable person to send out to pwn the neighborhood with his new invention.
By 1986, Johnson had the patent for the design, and in 1989 he reached a licensing agreement with the Larami Corporation (eventually acquired by Hasbro). The toy was initially called the Power Drencher, which just didn’t have the same ring to it as the Super Soaker.
At 71, Johnson is still the president of the Johnson Research and Development, Co, which he founded in 1991. He reportedly consults for NASA from time to time. Depending on the source you read, he has somewhere between a lot and a whole fucking lot of patents (sources vary between 130 and 250 patents). The Super Soaker has seen nearly a billion dollars in sales. He also designed the Nerf gun, just in case this one guy didn’t make your childhood fights with your siblings magical enough already.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, suggesting that February 25, which was celebrated once as Lonnie G. Johnson Day in Marietta, Georgia, becomes an annual thing.
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Thanks for this. Super Soaker is the best water gun ever!
Yes, definitely ranks up there with man’s most important inventions. Up there with Coca Cola and backyard weed killer.