Hasta La Ideas

L: Photo via AJC; R: 1983 patent drawing

You couldn’t make it up: According to a 2001 Times article, aerospace engineer was Lonnie G. Johnson had been working on technology for a $1.6 billion-dollar spacecraft when he accidentally discovered a children’s toy that is now his claim to fame. Tasked with “preparing an interplanetary spacecraft for its atomic battery” at his day job, he was working on a side project at home one night when he turned on a faucet hooked up to one end of a “prototype cooling device” with a metal nozzle.

“I turned and shot into the bathtub,” he recalled. The blast was so powerful that the whoosh of accompanying air set the bathroom curtains flying. “I said to myself, ‘Jeez, this would make a great water gun.'”

Indeed: Johnson had just created the precursor to the Super Soaker, which has since generated a over $1 billion in sales for Larami, now owned by Hasbro. He made headlines yesterday in winning 7.3% of that sum in his claim against the RI-based toy company… not that the immensely successful engineer and inventor needed it, but it’s a good excuse to paraphrase his tale.

Via CNBC; video below

Hailing from Mobile, Ala., Johnson (b. 1949) took to math and science at an early age, eventually taking first place in a science fair as a high school senior and earning several scholarships. Upon completing his master’s degree in nuclear engineering at Atlanta’s Tuskegee University, the born-and-raised Southerner spent his late 20’s moving westward, young family in tow, including a stint in Albuquerque before he ended up in Pasadena, working for the Air Force and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory respectively. By day, Johnson was responsible for integrating the nuclear power plant in the Galileo; by night, his DIY experiments nearly cost him his marriage… until, of course, that fateful evening in 1982.

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