Inventor makes big splash

The Super Soaker was born in a bathroom. In Lonnie Johnson's bathroom, to be exact. An aerospace engineer by day, Johnson tried to invent things after work.

One evening in 1982, he was fiddling around with vinyl tubing and a homemade metal nozzle, to see if he could make a cooling device that used water instead of Freon, a gas that can damage the Earth's atmosphere.

"Water shot out across the bathroom and into the bathtub, and it was so strong that it set up this air current that was making the curtains blow," he recalled in a phone interview from his Atlanta office. "I thought it would be awesome to have a really powerful water gun from that."

Johnson decided to work on the fancy water gun, make some money off it, and then get back to more scientific work. Instead, he spent 10 years trying to find a company to make his device. He eventually made millions of dollars off it, and he continues to work on improvements.

Johnson's breakthrough idea was that a kid could pressurize the water by pumping air into the gun. In later models, users built pressure by pumping water, instead of air. The biggest, baddest Super Soakers now sell for about $50.

Asked the secret of his success, Johnson said, "Patience." Curiosity and a knack for tinkering also helped. As a kid growing up in Mobile, Ala., Johnson loved fooling around with old pipes and motors. He even mixed his own rocket fuel.

"It caught on fire once in my mother's kitchen and my father just made me take it outside," he said. "They put up with what I did. They supported it."

A fan of the old TV show "Lost in Space," Johnson even built his own remote-controlled robot and won a prize for it. Such toys are common now, "but backin 1968, it was considered a pretty remarkable thing."

After getting a degree from Tuskegee University, Johnson studied nuclear engineering, became an Air Force officer and then worked at the government's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Today, Johnson is still working on the Super Soaker design, but he's also returned to this 20-year-old bathroom project: coming up with Earth-friendly cooling technology.

"Nobody's ever figured it out, and it's a really important thing," he said. "There's a few ideas I'm fooling around with."