LONNIE JOHNSON / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Give an idea
somewhere to go.
From the joy of a water toy to a student’s first build.
By Rob Urban
The Super Soaker gives Lonnie Johnson an unusually joyful place in the history of invention. A technical idea became a reason for children to run around outside, laughing and getting thoroughly wet.
I like that achievement on its own terms. Making play more exciting is a worthwhile use of an engineer’s imagination.
Then the rest of Johnson’s work opens up: spacecraft, energy research, and a STEM center where students have room to build. The range is fascinating, but the connection interests me just as much. Again and again, an idea needs somewhere to become real.
Johnson has spent his life making things, and he has helped create a place where other people can begin.
An invention with a joyful audience.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame traces the Super Soaker to Johnson’s work on an environmentally friendly heat pump. An investigation into one kind of useful device led to a very different possibility.
He licensed the toy to Larami in 1989. The Hall of Fame inducted him in 2022 and identifies the invention with U.S. Patent 4,591,071.
What delights me is the change in audience. The finished toy puts an engineer’s work into the hands of a child who wants to play. That child does not need the development history to enjoy the result.
There is a particular pleasure in a well-made plaything: it answers an action with an immediate, understandable effect. Pump, aim, release. The mechanism becomes part of the game.
Johnson’s invention belongs in an engineering story and in a story about delight. Both help explain why it is worth remembering.
The engineer inside the story.
NASA’s account of Johnson’s career begins with degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University, followed by work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and service in the U.S. Air Force.
He joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1979 as a senior systems engineer working on the Galileo mission to Jupiter. After another Air Force assignment, he returned to JPL in 1987 and received recognition for spacecraft system design.
I appreciate the specificity of that record. A spacecraft is a shared engineering undertaking, with individual contributions inside a much larger mission. Johnson’s part deserves to be understood in that setting.
The career also gives the toy’s origin a richer context. His curiosity had serious technical experience behind it. The range of applications makes the work interesting: the same person could contribute to a mission bound for Jupiter and devise an object that made an afternoon more fun.
Before the famous invention,
a robot named Linex.
A Hall of Fame profile describes an earlier robot, Linex, which Johnson built as a student. In 1968 he took first place at a University of Alabama science fair, where he was the only Black student competing.
The profile also recounts his father teaching him about electricity and showing him how to repair household objects.
Those details put people and materials around the familiar image of an inventor. There is someone willing to explain, something that can be taken apart or repaired, and a young person able to try an idea.
I find the robot especially appealing because it is an ambitious thing for a student to choose. Building one brings several questions together. What should move? What will make it move? How will the parts work as a whole?
Johnson had begun giving his curiosity a physical form.
Resources for the next question.
JTEC Energy’s company history says Johnson invested profits from the Super Soaker in his Atlanta laboratory. In 2020, he and Mike McQuary assembled a team of chemists, materials scientists and engineers to develop the Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter.
The company describes its aim as turning waste heat into usable electricity. That is the development ambition I am interested in here; the company’s performance claims require their own technical evaluation.
What I admire is the choice to keep investigating. A famous product can provide a comfortable endpoint to a public story. Johnson used the resources it generated to make further work possible.
There is also a team inside this chapter. A concept needs materials, experiments and people with different kinds of expertise. Naming that work gives the ambition a more substantial shape than a promise about the future alone.
Six students were a beginning.
The Johnson STEM Activity Center’s history starts with six middle-school students in an after-school robotics program in 2005. It records a computer lab supported by the Forever Young Foundation in 2019 and a virtual-reality learning space added in 2022.
I like reading those developments as additions to what a student can actually do. A room, a computer, a tool and someone who knows how to help can change the distance between having an interest and pursuing it.
The center describes its community as students, mentors, coaches, volunteers and supporters. That is a fuller picture of encouragement than a speech from a successful inventor.
It suggests people returning, answering questions and making a shared place work. Johnson’s name gives the center a powerful story; the continuing participation gives students somewhere to develop stories of their own.
Encouragement you can work with.
The center’s robotics program combines design and building areas, a computer lab, a competition field and one-to-one mentorship. Its program description explicitly welcomes beginners alongside students with previous experience.
That combination is what makes this part of Johnson’s work especially meaningful to me. The invitation comes with somewhere to act on it.
A student can begin with a question, find help, make an attempt and see what happens. The next question then has a little more substance. There is a part on the table, a behavior to explain, a decision to revisit.
It is easy to admire an inventor from a distance. A place like this brings the activity closer.
There is a lovely breadth to Johnson’s work: the pleasure of a toy, the demands of spacecraft engineering, the long inquiry of an energy project, and the possibility in a student’s first build.
Each gives an idea somewhere to go.
That is why I admire him. His story includes objects people can enjoy, problems worth continuing to investigate, and room for younger people to discover what they might make. The invitation keeps growing beyond the inventor himself.
Follow the work
Sources: the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s induction record and profile; NASA’s 2018 career account; JTEC Energy’s company history; and the Johnson STEM Activity Center’s history and programs. Company and center descriptions are attributed to those organizations. Interpretation by Rob Urban. Checked September 2026.