How the Super Soaker Was Accidentally Invented

The Super Soaker has been a staple to cool off and have fun for kids and even adults during those long, hot summer months. But the invention of the Super Soaker came by accident. Luckily, the man who invented it was a NASA engineer named Lonnie Johnson, and he saw the potential for a toy that was a step above any squirt gun offered on the market.

Johnson is a prolific inventor and has over 120 patents to his name. While many of these patents were for scientific and engineering purposes, others were strictly for fun, such as the Super Soaker. Johnson had always been an inventor and started his journey in 1968 with a robot he built for a high school science fair that ran on compressed air. He won first prize. Johnson later graduated from Tuskegee University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1973 and a master’s degree in nuclear engineering in 1975.

He went on to work for the US Air Force and got his first patent in 1979 for a device that read binary-encoded information from a photographically reduced scale. It became the basics of how CDs and DVDs are read. Johnson, at the time, was inventing as a hobby and didn’t pursue it. He later saw it commercialized and stated that it was “the big fish that got away.” After his employment at the Air Force, Johnson got a position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on the…