Necessity may be the mother of invention, but in the course of important discoveries, sometimes accidental findings are the most world-changing and, even if they’re not necessary, they can still be fun.
This is the Forgotten History of the Tinkerer’s Toy.
For as long as he could remember, Lonnie loved to tinker with things. His father, a World War II veteran, never finished high school but taught himself how to fix most anything, and Lonnie watched him in awe.
A broken clock? His dad could get it ticking again. Something wrong with the family car? It would be running again in no time. When he was old enough to hold a screwdriver, Lonnie would help him work and, when playing, would take apart his toys and put them back together just to see how they worked.
What his father lacked in formal education, he more than made up for in acquired knowledge of scientific concepts and he taught his son about electricity, engineering, and even jet propulsion. Lonnie loved to build toy rockets, and even when he nearly burned down the kitchen making rocket fuel on the stove, his parents encouraged him—but bought him a hot plate and told him to make his fuel outside.
By high school, Lonnie was such an accomplished builder that he won first prize in a high school science fair sponsored by the University of Alabama by building a robot that was powered by compressed air. The only black student competing in a state that was still largely segregated, Lonnie was dismayed when the science fair’s organizers didn’t even acknowledge his win.
Far from discouraging him, that slight made him work even harder, and he earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University. After graduation, he joined the Air Force and then NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Lonnie, the boy who loved to play with model rockets, was now engineering America’s voyages to Jupiter and Mars.
And in his spare time, he still loved to tinker with pretty much everything. He received patents for inventions as varied as a new type of hair dryer and a gadget that detected when a baby’s diaper was wet. At heart, though, he was still a kid at play and his favorite invention was a heat pump that used pressurized air to shoot a powerful stream of water. He had so much fun pranking his assistants by shooting them with his pump that he began to think this invention would work better as a toy.
He devoted more and more time to it, believing that the profits from it could fund his other projects, and came up with a unique design. The gun had a pump on the barrel that kids could pump to send a more powerful jet of water than any other squirt gun on the market, and Lonnie even had a catchy name for it: The Power Drencher.
He realized that his small team couldn’t possibly produce enough guns to turn a profit, so he partnered with the Larami Toy Company, who loved the gun but didn’t particularly like the name “Power Drencher.” The newly renamed toy was immediately a massive hit, generating $200 million in sales in just its second year on the market. Four years later, Hasbro, one of the largest toy companies in the world, acquired Larami and sales of Lonnie’s squirt gun skyrocketed even further.
Lonnie was a wealthy man but suspected that Hasbro was withholding profits from him and sued, eventually settling with the company for $73 million. The State of Alabama, which had once refused to acknowledge his science fair win, elected him the first black member of its Engineering Hall of Fame.
He was awarded the Air Force Achievement and Commendation medals and multiple awards from NASA for his contributions to jet propulsion, but it was his accidental invention that is his legacy, and it was put into the Toy Hall of Fame in 2015. Lonnie Johnson, the tinkerer, had achieved immortality with his most famous invention: The Super Soaker.