Summer officially ends this month, so it seems appropriate to pay tribute in this issue to one of the greatest (if not the greatest) water toys invented. With one squirt you can totally drench your friend, relative, or enemy while cooling them down on a hot day.

Did you know that the Super Soaker® was designed by a U.S. Air Force and NASA engineer? Lonnie Johnson had always been an inventor. As a child, he made his own toys with his father, including converting bamboo shoots into pressurized chinaberry shooters and using junkyard scraps paired with a lawn-mower motor to make his own go-cart (which he drove on the highway until the police pulled him over).

Johnson was the first Black student to compete in his high school science fair in 1968, and his compressed-air-powered robot, the “Linex,” took first prize. Johnson went on to attend Tuskegee University, receiving degrees in both mechanical and nuclear engineering. After graduating, he got a position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the U.S. Air Force, where he helped develop the stealth bomber program. Four years later, he was hired at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a systems engineer for the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Observer spacecraft, and the Cassini mission to Saturn.

It was while working at home on a heat pump (a device for heating and cooling that mechanically transfers heat to another source) that used water instead of Freon that Johnson came up with the idea for his most famous invention. It was 1982, and there was concern about how increased use of Freon would impact the environment. He was trying out nozzles in his bathroom sink when one of them shot a powerful stream across the room. Johnson made a prototype of Plexiglas® with room for an air pressure chamber and water reservoir inside. To fire the blaster, you pumped air into the pressure chamber with an external piston, then pushed a release valve, allowing some of the compressed air to escape, which expelled the water down the barrel. His six-year-old daughter and her friends loved it. Johnson continued to refine his design for the water blaster for years. He has often said that it was pure perseverance that ultimately led to him inventing the famous toy.

Johnson formed his own firm and licensed his most famous invention, the Power Drencher, to Larami Corporation in 1989. The name was later changed to Super Soaker®. By 1991 the Super Soaker® generated over $200 million in retail sales, becoming the best-selling toy in America. Larami Corporation was eventually purchased by Hasbro Corporation in 1995. Johnson continued to develop new toys at Hasbro and even learned how to adapt the Super Soaker® to shoot Nerf projectiles instead of water. When last reported, Lonnie Johnson held over 100 patents, with over 20 more pending. “For me, it’s almost magical being able to come up with ideas and then have them materialize,” says Johnson.

So what is Johnson up to now? He is currently the founder and president of Johnson Research and Development Company and is working with NASA on a heat-to-electric energy converter, as well as developing a lithium-air battery, which, if successful, could have the capacity to hold ten times the energy of a lithium-ion battery, Johnson believes. In 2022 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame®.