July 31, 2001 New York Times SCIENCE

Rocket Science, Served Up Soggy

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

On his day job in 1982, Lonnie G. Johnson, a 32-year- old aerospace engineer, was preparing an interplanetary spacecraft for its atomic battery. But he dreamed of inventing something that would change life on earth.

He often worked at home as his wife and children slept. One weekend, while tinkering in his bathroom, Mr. Johnson hooked up to the sink a prototype cooling device.

Meant to run on water, it bore at one end a length of vinyl tubing and a homemade metal nozzle. The rest, as they say, is history.

"I turned and shot into the bathtub," he recalled. The blast was so powerful that the whoosh of accompanying air set the bathroom curtains flying. "I said to myself, `Jeez, this would make a great water gun.' "

Mr. Johnson is the inventor of the Super Soaker, what industry experts call the world's most powerful and popular squirt gun.

Its 14 models cost up to $60 each and fire volleys of high-pressure water up to 50 feet, surprising parents who remember 39-cent guns that shot inches. Mr. Johnson's happenstance of science two decades ago not only redefined summer fun but began an industry that takes in more than $200 million a year.

"Wetter is better!" goes the slogan for the Super Soaker, one of the world's top-selling summer toys.

The secret of the Super Soaker is its deft storage and release of energy. With a few strokes of a hand pump and some intricate tubing and pressure bottles, Mr. Johnson did for water pistols what he had done earlier in his career for energizing space probes.

Today, Mr. Johnson is still at it. His business, Johnson Research and Development, lies outside Atlanta and has 14 employees. With 60 patents to his name and 20 pending, he talks confidently of bigger things to come: novel batteries, cars, spacecraft.

"There's no question that he will come up with some revolutionary invention," said Dr. S. Mostafa Ghia asiaan, an engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has worked with Mr. Johnson for a decade. "He really enjoys it. He's almost like a kid."

Lonnie George Johnson was born on Oct. 6, 1949, and grew up in Mobile, Ala., the third of six children. He excelled in science and math. In 1968, as a high school senior, he won first place in a science fair at the University of Alabama.

Significantly, his three-foot mechanical robot ran on compressed air, which in time would also power his water blasters.

His tinkering with air, Mr. Johnson recalled, "goes way back."

In college, on math and military scholarships, he dreamed of advancing the nuclear power industry and learned the complexities of atomic fission and high pressure. He graduated in 1975 from Tuskegee University with a master's in nuclear engineering.

In the late 1970's, he worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, overseeing the safety of projects involving space nuclear power.

In 1979, he moved to California and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an aerospace mecca.

There his nuclear skills helped integrate an atomic power plant into Galileo, a $1.6 billion spacecraft destined to study Jupiter and its 16 moons. It needed an atomic battery because sunlight would be too weak there to power solar panels.

David M. Durham, a spacecraft engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recalled that Mr. Johnson was known not only for professional excellence but for testing his wife's patience with his moonlighting.

"At one point, his wife nearly threw him out of the house because all he did was tinker," he said. After minor successes with inventions, he added, Mr. Johnson finally "came up with one that allowed him to no longer have to work for anybody."

It happened in 1982 while Mr. Johnson was working at home on a new kind of cooling device. At that time, refrigerators often used Freon, a gas that destroys the earth's ozone layer. He envisioned one that ran on water. It would not only be efficient but would also be environmentally friendly.

Mr. Johnson was tinkering with parts for his device when he experienced his squirt-gun eureka. He built a prototype for his 6-year-old daughter, and rave reviews from around the neighborhood convinced him that it had commercial potential.

For decades, the science of squirt guns was simple: pulling a trigger forced water in a small chamber out through a narrow opening. That principle has worked not only for water pistols but also for dispensers of perfumes, window cleaners and other household products.

Mr. Johnson's squirt gun was different. Most important, it abandoned the small water pump and made it possible to employ much more than the energy of a single finger squeeze. Instead, a child drove a large air pump repeatedly, with each stroke adding more air to produce greater compression and store more energy.

"A small kid would not have enough strength to create the level of force needed to make the gun shoot a long way," he recalled. "So I had to put the energy in a little bit at a time."

Repeated pump strokes sent air into a strong chamber filled with water. The pressure grew and grew, until a pull on the trigger unleashed torrents.

On Oct. 14, 1983, Mr. Johnson applied for a patent. While it was common, he wrote, to use compressed gas to power "high-velocity water flow from a nozzle," doing so with squirt guns was a novel idea.

The first company to which he licensed the idea went bankrupt. But he kept trying and tinkering, refining his design, filing for new patents. Soon, prototypes were topped by a distinctive thick plastic bottle that held water under high pressure. A more modest bottle would explode.

After years of setbacks, Mr. Johnson went in February 1989 to a toy fair in New York City and approached the Larami Corporation, a maker of squirt guns.

"He was dejected," recalled Al Davis, now the company's executive vice president. "He told me he had this amazing water gun" that nobody would manufacture.

Invited to the company's headquarters outside Philadelphia, Mr. Johnson impressed his future partners by blasting coffee cups off the table and firing across the boardroom. "I'd never seen anything like it," Mr. Davis said.

(Continued) 1

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 31, 2001

Answers

July 31, 2001 New York Times

Rocket Science, Served Up Soggy

(Page 2 of 2)

The manufacturer, now a Hasbro subsidiary called Larami Limited, moved fast. It had the first gun in the stores by late 1989 and sold it for $10. In November, Johnny Carson turned one on Ed McMahon during "The Tonight Show." Sales in 1990 were fairly strong.

Excited, Larami asked Mr. Johnson for more ideas. How could the gun be improved? What new models might be introduced?

Mr. Johnson came up with an advance that made the gun far more efficient. Each stroke of a child's arm would store more energy, increasing the possibilities for wet fun.

The improvement again centered on the pump. Mr. Johnson decided to switch to having the child pump water into the pressure chamber instead of air, and that change gave the gun more squirts per stroke. In the first-generation Super Soaker, the arm stroking the pump had to overcome rising resistance as pressures mounted in the reservoir bottle. As friction rose, the air in the pump would become increasingly compressed, getting hot.

"It would get so hot that it would melt the check valve," Mr. Johnson said of early prototypes.

The new model of the Super Soaker pumped water — which is incompressible under most conditions and immune to such heating and energy losses — but did so in a way that was far different from early squirt guns. The signature of Mr. Johnson's new design was two bottles, a reservoir with thin walls and a pressure chamber with thick walls.

Mr. Johnson's new gun pumped water from the unpressurized thin- walled reservoir into the thick- walled pressure bottle. Now, with high efficiency, each stroke of the pump pushed in water, and the air inside the bottle became more and more compressed, increasingly ready to fuel a gusher.

Mr. Johnson cannot recall how he got the idea. But once he did, he said, "it was obvious."

The new gun was a hit. High-efficiency Super Soakers became a mainstay of Larami's line. Today, such models have one or two pressure bottles ready to fill and fire.

To avoid both explosions and injuries, the guns have a relief valve that limits how high the pressures can go. Instructions for Super Soakers nonetheless carry a number of cautions. "Warning!" one says. "Do not shoot at anyone's face or eyes."

In striking a balance between fun and safety, the designers also made the streams of water fairly wide. That avoids any cutting action or anything more painful than a mild sting.

In 1991, as Super Soaker sales took off, Mr. Johnson founded his own firm, Johnson Research and Development, in Smyrna, Ga.

The company develops new products, specializing in areas like heat transfer, thermodynamics and fluid dynamics.

When Inventors' Digest asked Mr. Johnson in 1995 what advice he would give a struggling neophyte, he replied: "Perseverance! There is no short, easy route to success."

Today, Mr. Johnson is still refining his water-based cooling machine, the gadget that started it all. Known as the Johnson Tube, the patented device is 25 percent more efficient than conventional heat pumps and air conditioners. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has studied it as a means of controlling heat in spacecraft built to carry astronauts.

In an interview, Mr. Johnson said the device was fast evolving into a high-efficiency engine. One day, he said, it might power cars.

He is also designing a generation of electrical batteries based on ceramics and having solid-state features, the same as integrated circuits. Mr. Johnson sees them as ideal for powering micro machines.

Through his company, Mr. Johnson is working on new ways to make life better, and he hopes to make things a little better in Atlanta, too. He said Johnson Research and Development had recently bought some property in downtown Atlanta, where it plans, with the city's help, to create new jobs.

Asked why he invented, Mr. Johnson laughed.

"That's a tough one," he said. "I have these ideas, and they keep on coming."

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 31, 2001.

FWIW, Johnson is very black. Nerds come in all colors.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 31, 2001.

He often worked at home as his wife and children slept.

This sounds familiar. My cousin Dorothy in Chicago is married to a mechanical engineer. If she awakes and he is not there, she always knows where he is----in the basement tinkering.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 31, 2001.

An aside to this story: I recall that in the early '90's there was a serious movement afoot by a group of legislators in New Jersey (that bastion of freedom) to BAN the sale, use and possession of Super Soaker water guns. Had these fine public servants gotten the law passed as written, any and all water pistols would have been illegal in the state, and anyone caught with one would have faced the same charges as if it were a REAL gun. It never got out of committee, but it sure wasn't on account of all the soccer moms who wrote letters to the editors to the effect that "it would be a good idea...after all, I want to feel that my children are safe even if they aren't".

It was around this same time that the NJ bureaucratic machine decided that runny eggs were such a health hazard that diners and restaurants were forbidden by law to serve them, whether the patron ordered them runny or not... yet another instance of the benificent authorities looking out for their subject's best interests. There was an unusually large outcry about this in the state, but not until NJ was treated as a laughingstock in the national media.

Apparently a majority of New Jerseyans seem to find freedom unessential, but cringe at the thought of being mocked.

New Jersey: Land of the Slave, Home of the Terminally Alarmed.

-- zipperpull (*@*.*), July 31, 2001.

Zippy, having moved back to the Garden State recently - NJ's OFFICIAL nickname (breadbasket of the original thirteen colonies doncha know) - I will vouch for the general willingness of the inhabitants to let local/county/state governments run wild.

Rumor has it there's a bill before the General Assembly which calls for a 26 hour day to replace the current 24. Apparently localities throughout the state have complained for years that they don't have enough hours in the day to pass all the ordinances they would like.

I must take leave for now. I hear Alaska calling my name...

-- Rich (living_in_interesting_times@hotmail.com), July 31, 2001.

NJ has a long history of maternalistic legislation. Maybe they were just ahead of their time. When I grew up there 50 years ago, neato things were banned like BB guns and firecrackers. Young people could not get a driver's license until age 17. All cars had to be inspected once/year at state vehicle inspection centers. I can still remember sitting in a three block line in the car with my mom waiting to reach the inspection station (my guess is that such inspections are long gone). Naturally, if your car passed inspection, it got a sticker.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 31, 2001.

"I hear Alaska calling my name..."

State motto: If you can fit in here, you must be wearing camoflauge.

Seriously, it's a great state. Really big, too.

-- Miserable SOB (misery@misery.com), July 31, 2001.

Never been, M-SOB. Never considered going there, either. Time to reconsider, perhaps.

I've enjoyed my stay in NJ THIS time around. This area is a wondrous living museum populated with a marvelous diversity of ethnicities. Sitting out in the downtown at one cafe or another, with a cup of Earl Grey in hand, people watching has become a newly adopted hobby of mine. The patient observor is guaranteed a feast of beautiful women with which to fill the eyes and heart. A no-cal diet I highly recommend. :)

Spending much time out of doors thanks to abnormally mild temperatures this month. Hiking has replaced star gazing as my main pathway for connecting to the physical universe, as light pollution all but erases any sense of the vastness of the night sky here in northern NJ. I miss the star patterns of the northern Shenandoah Valley. I long for the hundreds of twinkling signal fires the cloudless nights would deposit upon that holy black canvass. The nectar of the gods. Drink long. Drink deeply. Fly up, up and away...

Trade-offs, eh? SSDD? In a matter of speaking, yes. With a positive spin.

Sorry 'bout the thread drift, Lars.

-- Rich (living_in_interesting_times@hotmail.com), July 31, 2001.

Rich, you bring back memories of 'people watching'. I just loved sitting at the park and watching the people walk (more like trot) by and wondering about them. Haven't done that in a long time and it seems that only the Easterners know what it's all about.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), August 01, 2001.

Good to see you, Maria. People-watching never interested me much before. Having lived in NC & VA since '93 I had almost forgotten the rich mix of ethnicities the metropolitan northeast houses. The pace and flow of society here still does not match my own, but there's no longer the shock to my system that once there was.

Localities left and right are working to beautify downtown areas; Hoboken was one of the first, if my recollection serves, in this latest wave to reclaim city centers from the attack of REALLY BIG CORPORATIONS - Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc. - and the effects those corps have on mom & pop stores - going out of business sales and then for rent/sale signs in one shop after another. Ghost downtowns.

Locally, the government is taxing the crap out of property owners in order (in part) to pay for improvements such as brickwork; fancy gaslights; "free" concerts, movies, and such held in the parks. They are also strangling small business owners with forced compliance as to shop facades meeting the GOVS approval as to design and execution and all manner of picayune regulations. They went so far as to condemn the building of the ONLY local grocery store in town - there aren't even ANY 7-11 type stores ANYWHERE in the city limits(!) - so they could then bring in an upscale supermarket (Kings). Kings backed out. Not scared off by the heavyhanded local politicos. Nah. So those who walked to the local supermarket for years many from what I'm told - can no longer do so. Maybe the supermarket building NEEDED condemning. Maybe lives were saved. I don't know.

M-SOB: mind sharing a bit on your Alaska experiences? Where? When? Maybe a Why? Whatever ya got. Muchas gracias.

-- Rich (living_in_interesting_times@hotmail.com), August 01, 2001.

Rich, what do you think of Brett Schundler?

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), August 01, 2001.

I don't mean what do you think of him politically; what do you think of his chances?

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), August 01, 2001.

I'm not a political animal so I don't read much on that subject, Lars, AND I'm surrounded by (holding my nose while I type) closed- minded Democrat Liberals. My bro, his SO, and their friends are all guilty of this most heinous state of being. They'd vote for a crash test dummy before looking at ANY Republican candidate for office. Some would say several million Republicans did exactly this (in reverse) last November...

That said, my understanding is McGreevey is not well liked as Dems go. It is certainly possible that he'll run an awful campaign and lose the race for Governor.

Schundler's victory in the Republican primary REALLY pissed off what there is of a NJ Republican machine. He must fundraise heavily outside the state and paste his message far and wide if he is to have a shot at victory.

The one issue I've heard crowing on from the Dem mob which surrounds me is that Schundler supports concealed carry permits. He (whisper) thinks responsible citizens should have the privelege to defend themselves with firearms. They (the Dem mob) believe McGreevey should speak ad nauseum on this issue in order to scare any Dems who are teetering.

If, in the next few months, I decide to pay attention to the race for Governor of NJ, I'll post my thoughts for you.

-- Rich (living_in_interesting_times@hotmail.com), August 01, 2001.