My name is Lonnie George Johnson. I am an African American inventor and engineer who was known for making many inventions and my most famous invention, The Super Soaker. But before I get into any of that, let's take a step back into what started my career.
I was born in 1949 in Mobile, Alabama as the child of David and Arline Johnson. My mother worked as a nurse's aide and my father was a WWII (World War Two) veteran who worked at an Air Force as a civilian driver. During my early years, my family wasn't the richest, so my dad had taught me and my sister how to fix and make our own toys to play with. Even when I was told not to, I would sometimes take apart my sisters dolls to see how they worked. That also reminds me on how I almost burned down our home because I was trying to make rocket fuel. Yea, Rocket Fuel, it was definitely a story worth talking about. But i'm getting off track here. Even with the legal segregation, I still had this dream that one day I would become a world famous inventor. And I never gave up on it.
Skipping ahead to my teenage years, I had attended an all black school called Williamson's High School. There, I made many great friends and they even gave me the nickname "The Professor" due to my interest in engineering. I believe in 1968, I had attended an engineering competition held by the Junior Engineering Technical Society at the University of Alabama. Much to my suprise, I was the only African American in this event. I had shown off a year-long project of mine, which was a compressed-air-powered robot I had made with spare scraps of metal I found. I had named this robot "Linex", and this alone won me the Competition! This achievement here showed me that I had the power to make great things, which only fueled my idea to be a world famous Inventor. A little while after High School, I went to college and got my degree!
After college, I went on to work in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a systems engineer in 1979. While my schedule was quite busy, I still had time to work on a couple side projects. One of these side projects happened to be my greatest invention, the Super Soaker.
It was around 1972 when I first got the idea. It took quite awhile to make a prototype, which I used to make the basic model. I didn't publish it until I was sure it was ready for public release. And so after 7 years of tampering, tinkering, and perfecting the design, I finally decided it was ready and sold it out to Larami corp. During this time, it was named as the "Power Drencher", which didn't gain much traction at the time. And so with a full rebrand and complete marketing change, The newly named "Super Soaker" had been a huge success! It had gained much more attention and had garnered over $200 Million dollars in sales by 1991!!
And this brings me to the present day, where I stand in front of my audience, now being able to tell everyone about how I manage to succeed, and that others can too.
