This year’s African American Steering Committee wants to pay attention to some of the long history, including famous creativity, craftsmen, scientists and leaders. Cutting black “You know?” this year will celebrate the invention of inventors and their everyday objects that help storytelling in movies and TV.
Dr. Lonnie Johnson
1949–
Lonnie Johnson is a technology development company Johnson Research and Development Co., Inc. President and Founder, and its Spin Off Companies, Excellatron Solid State, LLC; Johnson Electro-Mechanical Systems, LLC; and Johnson Real Estate Investments LLC. Johnson holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, an MS degree in Nuclear Engineering and an Honorary Doctorate. Doctor of Science from Tuskegee University. After graduation, he worked as a research engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and then joined the U.S. Air Force as acting head of the Space Nuclear Power Safety Division at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1979, he left the Air Force and accepted a position as senior systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he worked on the Galileo missions with Jupiter. In 1987, he returned to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on the Mars Observer Project and worked as a fault protection engineer at the early stages of the Saturn Project. He is responsible for ensuring that the failure of a single point spacecraft does not result in mission losses. During his nine-year career at JPL, he has won several NASA achievement awards for his work in spacecraft systems design. In 1989, Johnson established his own engineering company and licensed his most famous invention, Super Sack® Water Gun, to Larami. Two years later, SuperSoaker® created more than $200 million in retail sales and became the number one toy toy sold in the United States. Larami Corporation was eventually purchased by Hasbro Corporation, the world’s second largest toy maker. Over the years, the total sales of SuperSoaker® have reached nearly $1 billion. Currently, Lonnie Johnson has more than 100 patents, more than 20 pending, and is the author of several publications of Spacecraft Power Systems.
