Johnson, Lonnie G.

Source:

 African American National Biography

Johnson, Lonnie G.

(6 Oct. 1949– ),

inventor, entrepreneur, businessman, and nuclear engineer, was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, the third of six children of David Johnson, a driver for the Air Force, and Arline Washington Johnson, a nurse's assistant. Johnson attended W. H. Council Elementary School and Williamson High School in his segregated hometown. Guided by tolerant and patient parents who encouraged him during his early creative years when he fiddled with junk, Johnson was painfully aware of racial inequities, but that did not deter his curiosity about how things worked. His mother ingrained in him and his siblings the importance of knowledge, emphasizing what one puts in the brain counts in life. Likened to a child prodigy, nosy young Johnson habitually tinkered with his siblings' toys to see how they functioned. In project after project he monkeyed with old jukeboxes, plastic pipes, compression motors, and explosive rocket fuel, occasionally getting himself in trouble. Thin and wearing eyeglasses, at an early age he was dubbed “the professor.” When a senior in high school in 1968 at age 18, he won first place in a national science competition for his ingenuity in making a remote controlled robot called “Linex” at the University of Alabama Junior Engineering Technical Society Exposition, an unprecedented honor for a student from his locale.

Johnson excelled on the SAT scores and won a mathematics scholarship to Tuskegee University where he continued his tinkering in between studying and college life. Loans, assorted employment, and an Air Force ROTC scholarship augmented his college welfare as he pursued a BA in Mechanical Engineering. He was elected to the Pi Tau Sigma National Engineering Honor Society, and graduated with distinction in 1973. Two years later at Tuskegee University Johnson received an MS in Nuclear Engineering, and had a short stint as a research engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in 1975 before joining the U.S. Air Force.

In 1978, by now married, Johnson was acting chief of the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section with the rank of captain at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He left the Air Force in 1979, and accepted the post of Senior Systems Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Pasadena, California, where he worked on the Galileo Project which sent an unmanned craft to Jupiter. In the spring of 1982, he returned to the Air Force at Omaha, Nebraska, as a managing officer of the Advanced Space Systems Requirements for Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Offett AFB. Then, from 1985 to 1987, he became Major Selectee and chief of the Data Management branch at SAC at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

His Air Force career netted him the Commander in Chief (CINC) Strategic Air Command nomination for astronaut training as a space shuttle mission specialist. Also he won an Air Force Achievement Medal in addition to two Air Force Commendation Medals. During his military life Johnson enjoyed seeking novel methods of providing power to satellite computer memories and delighted in finding new ways to detect enemy submarines. He found paperwork annoying, however, and was frustrated at efforts by the Air Force to honor people of higher rank for his work. Throughout his JPL career Johnson acquired numerous awards from NASA for his talent on spacecraft system design.

On his off-hours in military housing shared with his family, Johnson came up with a plethora of ideas. In 1977, fired with ambition, he decided to file for federal protection on his inventions so that, hopefully, he could reap some financial reward from them. He teamed up with inventor John M. Lederer on his first patent for a digital distance measuring instrument, which was granted on 6 March 1979. The following year he received two patents as sole inventor, the first for a variable-resistance type sensor-controlled switch, and the other for a smoke-detecting timer-controlled thermostat. He was well on his way to becoming a prolific creative genius. During these years Johnson, his wife, Thelma, and their children Aneka, David, and Kenya relocated several times, moving from state to state with boxes of his junk in tow.

Working on personal time in 1982, Johnson gave birth to the squirt gun, trademarked as the Super Soaker. He had been tinkering at home with a new heat pump that could use water instead of Freon as the cooling or heating medium. When he was experimenting with vinyl tubing and a self-made nozzle with a vacuum chamber, a powerful jet of water erupted across the bathroom, flinging the shower curtain aside and drenching the room. It was a breakthrough moment. He confided in his eldest, Aneka, then six years old, that he was going to make a great water gun. The sudden realization that kids could pressurize the water by forcing air into the gun mechanism that ejected water at a high velocity was inspiring. From that day forward, Johnson's creative juices flowed until he made his first powerful water gun. Much to the delight of his daughter and the neighborhood children, the prototype became an instant success. The history of the Super Soaker had begun.

To financially back his brainchild Johnson pursued investors at trade shows for venture capital, efforts which proved exhausting. He consistently corresponded with the U.S. Department of Energy about the efficiency of his heat pump, but was ignored for years, much to his distress. It took another seven laborious years for Johnson to get industry respect and recognition by any manufacturer. In the meantime his wife was feeling neglected, taking second place to his research. Nonetheless, Johnson began to file patent applications and was awarded his first squirt gun patent on 27 May 1986 (USP 4,591,071).

According to the Washington Post, “the lowest point [in his life] came in 1987, when Johnson left the Air Force with the understanding that an investment capital firm would contract to develop some of his ideas. At the last minute, the firm backed out, demanding that he first pay $8,000” (27 December 1991). This predicament left the family without income and a home, but more devastatingly, he was sued when he tried to retreat from an agreement.

The JPL rehired Johnson in 1987. Happy to have him back, supervisors described the inventor as “extremely innovative” and “very conscientious and hardworking … a team player.” He was an employee with a winning personality who always had a fresh approach to a problem. Johnson worked on the Mars Observer projects and was significant in the early period of the Cassini (Saturn) Mission. He was liable for making certain that single point spacecraft failure would not cause a mission loss.

Privately continuing to produce new concepts from his inventive skills, Johnson in 1989 decided to establish a company, Lonnie G. Johnson Engineering, to promote his ideas. Finally setting his own path, he left the JPL in 1991, and moved his family to Atlanta, Georgia.

Johnson's fortitude, resilience, and perseverance paid off that year, when he renamed his firm Johnson Research and Development Company Incorporated, which produced and sold his successful toy gun invention. Johnson licensed the invention in 1991 to Larami Corporation (Philadelphia), one of the world's largest toy producers. An executive saw the Super Soaker at a New York Trade show. The first water gun, priced at ten dollars, sold very well at the beginning, and sales escalated after Johnny Carson experimented with it on his show, and a television commercial advertised it nationally. The phenomenal success of the Super Soaker allowed Johnson to devote himself full-time to his innovations. In 1991 ten million units of the Super Soaker were sold. The Cobb County, Georgia, Chamber of Commerce in that year gave Johnson's company the “Small Business of the Year” award. The sales figure doubled in 1992, generating more than $200 million in retail sales. For the next ten years sales reached close to one billion dollars.

In the mid-1990s Larami was purchased by Hasbro Corporation, a giant toy manufacturer. Due to Johnson's intellectual property rights, the Super Soaker maintained a competitive edge in the toy industry. From another license agreement with Hasbro, Johnson designed, engineered, and developed a soft foam dart gun, trademarked NERF, which has become a popular staple toy of the summer. Johnson Research also ventured into the field of toy rocketry and air power technology with Estes Air Rockets.

Capitalizing on the success of the Super Soaker, Johnson founded two other Atlanta-based companies, Excellatron Solid State LLC, and Johnson Electro-Mechanical Systems LLC, to develop leading edge technology from consumer products and toys to environmentally friendly alternative methods of power. The former company specializes in solid state thin film lithium rechargeable batteries—technology originating at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—while the latter company produces ideas that have the potential for changing the global energy market. Johnson's companies have been awarded contracts from NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. Another of the Johnson group of companies, Johnson Real Estate Investments LLC, is involved with the community in outreach programs, and has a vested interest in stimulating economic growth in Atlanta's disadvantaged areas.

Johnson's phenomenal achievement did not go unnoticed. Many works chronicle Johnson's career. In addition to publishing in technical journals, Johnson made television appearances. He was on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on a segment of Science Times viewed on the National Geographic channel. The Hasbro Corporation named him to their Inventor Hall of Fame in 2000, and the following year Tuskegee University bestowed upon Johnson, an adjunct professor there, an honorary Doctorate in Science. With his first marriage dissolved, Johnson in 2002 married Linda Moore who gave birth in the fall of the next year to a daughter, Jalelah.

In addition to the inventions already mentioned Johnson patented an electrochemical conversion system, a magnetic propulsion toy system, an automatic sprinkler control, a pinch-trigger pump water gun, a wet-diaper detector, a thin lithium film battery, and a hair-curler drying apparatus.

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