Margaret Galloway reading to children at the Bronzeville Children’s Museum
Black History Month event introduced children to Toy Hall of Fame inventor
Peggy Montes had a super soaker in her hand and was ready for some action. There was no water in the gun, but she and volunteers rounded up a group of kids for a special Black History Month event.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Montes’s Bronzeville Children’s Museum in Chicago’s Calumet Heights neighborhood on the Far South Side honored Lonnie Johnson, a former NASA engineer. The HBCU grad invented the Super Soaker, the popular oversized water gun that produces powerful gushes of water and leaves individuals drenched and wet all over.
Popular at pool parties and beaches, the Super Soaker became one of the hottest toys in America during the 1990s and 2000s. The toy has generated $1 billion in sales for Hasbro, the company that manufactures the Super Soaker.
At the Bronzeville Children’s Museum, dozens of kids gathered around Margaret Galloway, an animated storyteller, who read the children’s book, “Whoosh!: Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions.”
The book tells the story of Johnson’s life before he hit it big with his invention. The book also talks about Johnson’s other invention that many people don’t know about.
“Did you know that he was really into rockets?” Galloway asked the children as she read the book.
“Lonnie loved building and creating ideas, and inventions just kept on flowing and flowing. Lonnie loved doing this. He learned how to make a rocket from scratch. Kids at school would gather to watch Lonnie launch things. And he learned how to make rocket fuel! When it caused a fire in the kitchen, Lonnie’s mom didn’t make him stop. She just sent him to work outside.”
After Galloway finished reading the book, she led the children in singing several songs. Then she and other volunteers helped the children create mobile units that included paper cutouts of the Super Soaker and a boom box.
Born in 1949 in Mobile, Alabama, Johnson grew up tinkering and taking things apart. He took apart his sister’s doll to see what made the eyes close. He also built a go-cart out of junkyard scraps and a lawnmower engine.
Johnson graduated from the once segregated Williamson High School. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University. He worked for Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the U.S. Air Force, where Johnson said he helped develop the stealth bomber program.
Four years later, Johnson worked as a systems engineer for NASA at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There, Johnson worked on NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Observer spacecraft and the Cassini mission to Saturn.
In 1982, while working at home on a heat pump that uses water instead of Freon, Johnson was trying out nozzles in his bathroom sink when one of them shot a powerful stream into the bathtub.
The incident gave Johnson an idea to build a water gun that had very high water pressure. That year, Johnson left NASA to return to the Air Force. In his spare time, he worked on his water gun.
Johnson faced many setbacks as one company after another turned down his invention. After tweaking his toy, Johnson licensed his idea to the Larami Corporation, which was eventually bought by Hasbro. Inc.
In 1991, the Super Soaker hit store shelves across the country and quickly became the No. 1 selling toy in the country. It remained one of the hottest toys of summer for years.
The Super Soaker, in 2015, was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. In 2022, Johnson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
During the Bronzeville Children’s Museum event, Montes said Johnson’s brother Michael visited the Black History Month event and had Lonnie call his cell phone to encourage the children.
“It was a really big surprise,” Montes said. “We were shocked.”
Today, Johnson spends time speaking to future engineers and students about persevering and overcoming setbacks and naysayers.
“It is about perseverance,” Johnson said on his website. “And the disheartening thing is that, when you come up with a really, really different idea that’s really unique, most people won’t get it. They won’t see the vision that you see. And the only way to make the reality is to persevere. You understand better than anybody what the potential could be.”
