Lonnie Johnson Quotes

Lonnie Johnson

Profession : Inventor

Birth : October 6, 1949

After I graduated from Tuskegee with a masters in nuclear engineering, the draft was on so I signed up for ROTC. I figured if I had to go into the military, I'd rather go in as an officer.

Lonnie Johnson

I got my first patent in 1979 before I left the Air Force. I called it the Digital Distance Measuring Instrument. It used ones and zeros and dots and dashes and a magnifying lens to read binary-encoded information from a scale that was photographically reduced. It used the same kind of technology that's used in CDs and DVDs.

Lonnie Johnson

There are maybe three inventions I have that I rank as my top inventions that I'm most proud of. The robot I built in high school, the memory-protected circuitry for the Galileo and the Super Soaker.

Lonnie Johnson

I have a collection of SuperSoakers. I have managed to keep most of them.

Lonnie Johnson

I was working on a heat pump that used water as a working fluid, and I made some jet pumps for it. I accidentally shot a stream of water across a bathroom where I was doing the experiment and thought to myself, 'this would make a great gun.'

Lonnie Johnson

I thought to myself, jeez, it would be really nice to have a high power water gun. It felt really, really good holding a powerful stream in my hand.

Lonnie Johnson

The invention that most people know me for is the Super Soaker water gun. I knew the gun worked well, and I knew it would be successful. I did not realize how successful it would be.

Lonnie Johnson

When I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in the early '80s is when I first got the idea. The Super Soaker was based on some engineering principles that I applied. I was actually working on another invention which was a heat pump that would use water as a working fluid instead of Freon.

Lonnie Johnson

I am a nuclear engineer. I'm working on advanced energy technology. I have a new type of the engine that converts heat into electricity, and I've also developed a new type of battery that's all ceramic, without liquid electrolyte.

Lonnie Johnson

I decided I could develop a toy and get some revenue from that and then use that revenue to really become an inventor and work on some of the more challenging projects I had in mind.

Lonnie Johnson

That's one of the advantages of being an inventor and tinkerer - I have everything I need to make what I need.

Lonnie Johnson

I can remember times when we'd be having parties, and people would be dancing and everything and I would be sitting there in the middle doing calculus, just doing my little thing.

Lonnie Johnson

I consider myself a general practitioner. I do electronic things. I do toys and water things, mechanical stuff. I'm very, very flexible.

Lonnie Johnson

There was a time in my life when I was independently wealthy.

Lonnie Johnson

Especially when you have a lot of technology you're developing as a small company, trying to protect that technology is a real problem.

Lonnie Johnson

More and more, other countries are able to manufacture things cheaper, beating us in the marketplace in a lot of ways. So we need to do whatever we can to make sure America's ability to protect its ingenuity is as strong as it can be.

Lonnie Johnson

You sometimes have a very innovative company, and if they come up with one idea, they can come up with many more - if they're successful. If they can't feed themselves, you lose that creativity.

Lonnie Johnson

Large companies can afford to file patents on every idea they have. Small companies, we have to weigh our options, do the research. We have to decide where to place our bets. We can't just cover everything we do.

Lonnie Johnson

It was because of the success of the Super Soaker, I was able to at least get an audience with people to present some of my other ideas.

Lonnie Johnson