Soaking In Success

By Timothy Roche

Lonnie Johnson had come home to tinker again. In 1982 the young nuclear scientist spent his days developing advanced space systems for the Strategic Air Command. At night, while his wife and kids slept upstairs, he used mathematic and scientific formulas to launch his own dreams from the basement. He had built a model of a heat pump that used water instead of unfriendly Freon. Attaching a homemade nozzle to the end of tubing and connecting it to his bathroom sink, he carefully turned on the water. It shot out a stream so powerful that its air currents ruffled the curtains. "Eureka!" Johnson told himself. "This would make a great water gun."

The rest, as they say, is history. Johnson, a small-town prodigy called the Professor by his high school buddies, had wrought one of the best-selling toys ever: the Super Soaker, a pump-action water gun capable of streaming water 50 feet. In the 12 years since he first got U.S. Patent No. 4,591,071 for the "squirt gun," as it is listed in official government records, more than 200 million Super Soakers have been sold. Revenue estimates for the gun range as high as $400 million. "Lonnie is the American success story," says Dick Apley, director of independent inventor programs for the U.S. Patent Office.

The Super Soaker is just one of 62 patents (with an additional 18 pending approval) that Johnson has amassed since his basement days. He's had ideas for hair-drying rollers, a digital thermostat, a baby-diaper detector that activates musical nursery rhymes when wet, and a device that measures soil moisture and waters grass automatically. Many of his ideas never went further than the prototype. He didn't have the money or the contacts in those early days to push them into production. "There are all kinds of ways to skin a cat, and there are all kinds of mousetraps," says Johnson, 51. "Lady Luck is indifferent. She smiles sometimes, and she frowns sometimes."

History books already include passages about Johnson's success as an African-American inventor, showing his work next to the everyday inventions of other black scientists and engineers who are relative unknowns: the man who invented refrigerated trucks, the woman who developed a machine for hair permanents or the man who patented the automatic traffic signal. Officials from the Patent Office, which reports that only 6% of patent applications come from blacks, hail Johnson as a role model and cite his Super Soaker to capture the imagination of schoolchildren.

As a kid in Mobile, Ala., Johnson says, he was inspired by the legend of George Washington Carver. Johnson was born to a large family in the segregated South; his father worked as a civilian driver at the local Air Force base, and his homemaker mother sometimes worked in a laundry or as a nurse's aide. In the summer, Johnson's parents would pick cotton on his grandfather's farm. The family lived on $126 a month, but they were not so poor as others in the neighborhood.

He and his brothers often watched their father work on his car and make repairs around the house. The boys built their own toys, turning bamboo tubes into pressurized chinaberry shooters and transplanting a lawn-mower motor onto a go-cart. Once, Johnson caused an explosion in his mother's kitchen while mixing, of all things, rocket fuel. He had got the recipe from a library book, using saltpeter and sugar. As it cooked on the stove, the mixture bubbled to the surface, filling the kitchen with so much smoke that young Lonnie couldn't see his hands, and burned a chair. "The only thing I could do was back up," he says. He eventually used the fuel mixture to launch a miniature rocket for a school project.

His earliest stroke of genius may have been a remote-controlled robot he named Linex. His imagination was shaped by what he had read in library books and by the robot on the television series Lost in Space. For nearly a year he scavenged at junkyards to find the parts he needed to build the robot's base. He gave it wheels, and he used his sisters' reel-to-reel tape recorder for its eyes. The guts from his brothers' walkie-talkies transmitted signals to the hunk of metal and controlled its movements. Linex won the state science fair in 1968--about the same time Johnson took a science-club test and was informed that he had "little aptitude for engineering." Perhaps, he was told, being a mere technician would better suit him. Looking back, Johnson wonders whether his race was a factor. Winning the science fair had been a big deal because his high school was for black students only, though his graduating class was the last segregated one at the school.

THE ULTIMATE WEAPON

On scholarship at Tuskegee University, Johnson earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's in nuclear engineering. He did thermal analysis of plutonium fuel spheres at the Savannah River National Laboratory and developed auxiliary cooling systems at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, he worked as a systems engineer for the Galileo mission to Jupiter. He joined the Air Force, where he was assigned to the Strategic Air Command and studied nonnuclear-strategic-weapons technology and worked on the Stealth bomber program. He later went back to the Jet Propulsion Lab, where he worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn and was the project engineer for the short-lived Kraft mission to study an asteroid flyby.

It was during the space-probing missions that he happened upon his idea for the Super Soaker. He dubbed his creation a "pneumatic water gun" and made his first prototype from PVC pipe, a plastic Coke bottle and Plexiglas. Then he turned loose his six-year-old daughter Aneka on the neighborhood. Kids and adults alike went nuts over the toy.

For nine years Johnson hawked the water gun to toymakers. It was going to cost $200,000 to produce 1,000 guns. Finally, at a toy fair in New York City, he was introduced to Al Davis, now the executive vice president at Larimi Corp. "I turned around, and there was the saddest guy I'd ever seen," remembers Davis. "He'd been trying to find somebody who was interested in it. He told me that if we turned him down, he was going to give it up."

Davis, mildly interested and polite, invited the dejected inventor to the company's headquarters in Philadelphia, telling him to stop by if he was ever in the neighborhood. Johnson wasted no time; he made a special trip two weeks later and demonstrated the gun for Larimi executives in a conference room. "Wow!" was their only response.

A HELPING HAND

Today the Super Soaker has been tweaked and repackaged, with more than 20 different designs. It remains one of the top 20 toys every year, even though it is on store shelves for limited months in most places. But rather than simply retire, Johnson has used his royalties to fund his own research laboratory in Atlanta. What started in his basement moved to a nearly abandoned shopping center in a suburb north of Atlanta and will soon move into spacious digs in one of Atlanta's empowerment zones, a boost to an African-American neighborhood. Johnson Research & Development is a New Age kind of place, where no one drinks coffee and the product engineers are Gen Yers who wear shorts to work and tease Johnson about replacing him through their own cool ideas someday. They snatch the Oreo cookies that he keeps in his desk. He and his staff of 41 are inventing new toys and other products but won't talk about them until the kinks have been worked out of prototypes and the patents have been issued. With the Super Soaker's success, Johnson bought a shiny black Mercedes and a million-dollar home in an exclusive Atlanta neighborhood that was once part of the old Governor's mansion maintained with slave labor. He bought his mother a new Cadillac and paid to renovate her house (she wouldn't let him buy her a new one). He makes it home to Mobile at least once a month.

Johnson has set up a division of his company to broker new inventions, counseling throngs of would-be designers who call him for advice and seek money from him to finance their own dreams. He has also found new interest in his old ideas. Next year a hair curler he conceived of more than a decade ago is expected to be mass-produced in time for Mother's Day.

But he's banking on something bigger than squirt guns and hair dryers. He hopes to revolutionize the $50 billion battery market. At a venture capitalists' conference in October, the usually shy and reserved Johnson charmed the audience, trying to drum up $10 million to produce an "energy storage device," which in layman terms is a rechargeable battery smaller than a penny that could eventually be used in cellular phones, laptops and pacemakers.

Seldom does Johnson have time to tinker anymore. He is so busy that he has a personal assistant to keep track of his meetings and travel arrangements. His new house doesn't have a lab in the basement, and he sometimes misses the old days. He still hasn't given up on the potential of the thermal heat pump that led to the Super Soaker discovery. He is also convinced that he has developed an idea for an ambient-heat engine--a motor powered by environmental heat and thermal energy. "As an inventor, it's a rite of passage to have an engine," he says. "I'd like to have my own engine someday."