Lonnie Johnson

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

“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.”

“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.”

“When I think back on my childhood and the things that happened to me, there were certain periods of time where I felt like I was being saved for something. I feel like I have a gift, and it would be a sin to waste it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Being an independent inventor is tough. You develop a product, patent it, then you're looking for someone who will see the benefit from this technology. You assume all the investment and all the risk. It can be a challenge.”

“Nobody's going to step in and dump a lot of money and make it easy. Unless you have a lot of money, you have to pay your dues and make a personal sacrifice.”

“I have never really understood why in this country so many people look down on black people.”

“Lady Luck is indifferent. She smiles sometimes, and she frowns sometimes.”

“Persevere. That's what I always say to people. There's no easy route.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“I love playing around with ideas and turning them into something useful or fun.”