A battery powered oscillator circuit and a water flow powered sound generator produce futuristic space ray gun sound effects when the gun is shooting. Johnson struggled for several years to find a company that could turn his idea into a commercial success. There were many skeptical responses and several false starts until finally in one toy manufacturer realized the potential for his drenching device.
He licensed it to the Larami Corporation, which initially marketed the toy as the Power Drencher in It took some tweaking and rebranding until the toy took off. It has been one of the top toys sold every year since then and has spawned numerous brand extensions for drenching friends and family.
His invention was a rarified breakthrough because of its success. It ranks up there with the Slinky and Silly Putty. None of them were designed to be toys. Royalties from the Super Soaker and Nerf Blaster have enabled Johnson to pursue his dreams in a way he never imagined possible.
Born nearly 70 years ago in the segregated South, the African American inventor has had to prove himself as a talented and capable scientist. He graduated from Tuskegee University before joining the U.
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 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. 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 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. Johnson : I call it the big fish that got away. 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. I was working on a new heat pump that used water instead of Freon because Freon is bad for the environment. 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. I had a number of false starts. Johnson : Initially I wanted to manufacture it myself and I talked to some companies that could handle that.
I had spent my career in the military, so manufacturing and business were outside my bailiwick. Johnson : In 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. A kid would take the plane out of the box, and it would dive and break apart. 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.
I took the gun out of my suitcase. They asked if it worked and I shot water across the conference room. The year was , only five years after a federal district court ordered the University of Alabama to admit Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood. Governor George Wallace, who earlier that year had declared, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium, causing a showdown with federal authorities.
Photo by Thomas S. He attended Tuskegee University on a scholarship. After high school, Johnson attended Tuskegee University, graduating with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and a master's in nuclear engineering. One of his first jobs after school was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working on cooling systems for nuclear reactors. Since then, I've always felt very good about my education at Tuskegee. He worked on the Galileo spacecraft that was sent to Jupiter.
During his time at NASA, he developed a pivotal power supply mechanism for the Galileo spacecraft that was deployed to study Jupiter and its moons. That to me was a major moral victory, to think, I've arrived, now I'm a real engineer. More Videos He spent days working on the Stealth Bomber, and nights on the Super Soaker.
It was also around that time that he got the initial idea for the Super Soaker. I actually couldn't tell my wife what I was working on in the daytime, it was that top secret. While Johnson's creative and technical genius may strike at any time, there is a lot that goes into taking a spark of discovery and turning it into something that is ready for the world.
It's a story of perseverance. There were a few Super Soaker prototypes that were never sold.
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