Lonnie Johnson, 67, invented one of the most successful toys of all time, the Super Soaker water gun. Introduced in 1990, it has racked up retail sales of more than $1 billion. He developed the toy after-hours while working as an engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. A native of Mobile, ALA, he went to an all-black high school, earned a master’s in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University and served in the U.S. Air Force, always tinkering with his own inventions on the side. Though he had no experience in the toy industry, he saw the promise of his super-powered water pistol and persuaded executives at Larami, a company that made knock-off toys, to produce his invention and pay him royalties. Since 1981, he has funded his own Atlanta-based engineering firm, Johnson Research, which has 25 employees and minimal revenue. He’s betting a share of his fortune on two devices that he believes can revolutionize electrical power generation and storage. In this interview, which has been edited and condensed, he talks about his hits and misses.
Susan Adams: What inspired you to be an inventor?
Lonnie Johnson: As far back as I can remember, I was interested in devices and how they worked. I took everything apart.
Adams: What was one of your earliest inventions?
Johnson: In 1968 when I was in high school I built a four-foot-tall remote control robot with pneumatic cylinders that operated his hands. My robot won first place at a science competition at the University of Alabama where my high school was the only African-American school represented. That was a huge moral victory.
Adams: Did you want to build a career as an inventor?
Johnson: After I graduated from Tuskegee with a masters in nuclear engineering, the draft was on so I signed up for ROTC. I figured if I had to go into the military, I’d rather go in as an officer.
Adams: Did you do any inventing while you were in the military?
Johnson: I worked on nuclear reactors and I was doing computer modeling of space launches. I wound up getting offered a job at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I invented a power supply mechanism for the Galileo space craft which was in orbit around Jupiter until 2003. My peers at the lab told me I couldn’t do that, so it was another moral victory when I did.
Adams: Do you think race played a role in your colleagues’ underestimating you?
Johnson: That’s the only explanation I can come up with.
Adams: What did you think of the movie “Hidden Figures”?
Johnson: I thought it was a great movie. 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.
Adams: How did you decide to go into business as an inventor?
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 1979 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. It used the same kind of technology that’s used in CDs and DVDs.
Adams: You invented CD and DVD technology?
Johnson: I call it the big fish that got away. I didn’t pursue it. 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. When I realized the technology was being commercialized, it didn’t dawn on me that it was something I should pursue.
Adams: How did you invent the Super Soaker?
Johnson: While I was at the Jet Propulsion lab, I was always tinkering. I was working on a new heat pump that used water instead of Freon because Freon is bad for the environment. I was experimenting with nozzles I’d made that shot a stream of water across the bathroom and I thought they’d make a good water gun. 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.
Adams: How much research did you do on the toy industry?
Johnson: I got the idea in 1982 but I didn’t work on it until I was back in the military in Omaha and had a shop set up in my basement. I had a number of false starts.
Adams: What did you try that didn’t work?
Johnson: Initially I wanted to manufacture it myself and I talked to some companies that could handle that. But when they told me it would cost $200,000 to get the first 1,000 guns off the production line, I figured at $200 each, nobody was going to pay that much for a water gun. I didn’t understand that the tooling costs a lot but once you got the production line set up, you’d get the cost way down. I had spent my career in the military, so manufacturing and business were outside my bailiwick.
Adams: Where did you go from there?
Johnson: In 1987 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. They manufactured 60,000 planes, spent $1 million in TV advertising and shipped planes with a design flaw. A kid would take the plane out of the box, and it would dive and break apart.
Adams: Did you lose a lot of money on that invention?
Johnson: I lost time and I didn’t get the income I was expecting.
Adams: How did you find a company to make the Super Soaker?
Johnson: It was 1989 and I’d written letters to companies including Hasbro, who dismissed the idea. Eventually I went to the Toy Fair and I met a guy in the hallway who said I should talk to the folks at Larami, a small company that made knock-off toys. At the fair, I managed to meet with someone there and he said, “If you’re ever in Philadelphia, come and see us and we’ll be happy to talk to you.” He said, “Don’t make a special trip.” So I went to Philadelphia and waited over an hour in the reception area before I got in to see someone. I took the gun out of my suitcase. They asked if it worked and I shot water across the conference room. They turned the prototype into the first Super Soaker.
Adams: Did it catch on with customers right away?
Johnson: The first year, the gun sold so well, they wanted to expand the product line. It took me a couple of weeks to design a model with two bottles that was more efficient. That was the Super Soaker 100.
Adams: How much money did you make from the Super Soaker?
Johnson: I can tell you that I received a royalty on sales, that the Super Soaker was the No. 1 selling toy in the world and that between 1992 and 1995, it topped $1 billion in sales. Because of the success of the Super Soaker, Hasbro bought Larami.
Adams: It’s been reported that you received $73 million from the settlement of a legal dispute over unpaid royalties from Hasbro.
Johnson: I settled for less than that. There was too much on the table to take a risk.
Adams: Are you still collecting royalties on the Super Soaker?
Johnson: No. The toy is still around but the patents have expired. In hindsight, one of the things I learned was the value of the brand. The Super Soaker name was the result of a discussion between myself and the president of Larami. If I’d understood the value of the brand, I would have put it in my contract, which was just a patent license.
Adams: Did you invent any other toys?
Johnson: I invented high performance nerf dart guns that were better than what Hasbro had on the market and they made a licensing deal with me on those.
Adams: What are you working on now?
Johnson: Energy technology. I’ve invented a new type of engine that converts heat directly into electricity with no moving mechanical parts. It’s called the Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, the JTEC.
Adams: What sort of uses would it have?
Johnson: Anywhere you have an existing engine, you could use the device. Converting heat from the sun, converting body heat into electricity, waste heat from machinery.
Adams: Have you sold it to anyone?
Johnson: No, it’s still in the laboratory but we have several patents. I’ve talked to NASA about using the device to make their limited supply of plutonium stretch a lot further. One of the applications we’re looking at is using body heat to generate electricity. Imagine charging your cell phone from your body heat when you’re running or walking.
Adams: What else are you working on?
Johnson: My other invention is an all-ceramic battery. Existing batteries use liquid electrolytes. My battery uses glass as an electrolyte. We can hold between two and three times the energy that a lithium ion battery can. The idea is that the JTEC could convert heat from the sun to electricity and the battery could store the heat until you’re ready to use it. Solar power would be one application. You could also use it in nuclear power plants.
Adams: How are you financing these projects if you have no customers?
Johnson: Revenue from past successes. My business model is to take on really innovative, high-risk technical projects and solve them, and achieve breakthroughs. I want to bring the risk down to a level where it would be tolerable for companies. We own the intellectual property and we’re free to make whatever deal we feel is appropriate.
Adams: How much risk are you taking personally?
Johnson: The risk is higher than most people would be comfortable with. A lot of what I’m working on wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have my own resources.
Adams: Why are you willing to do take such a risk?
Johnson: One has to spend life in a meaningful way. It may be a long time before my project gets done because it will be a long time before someone else sees what I see.
