Fascinating interview! I had just learned about Lonnie Johnson yesterday!<p>I was reading up on the Lingo programming language[1] and found out that it was invented by a Jamaican computer scientist named John H. Thompson [2], which led me to learn about Lonnie Johnson.<p>> "After I had settled into my new job and home, I set to work making the parts of the plastic water gun on a little lathe and milling machine in the basement."<p>It would be super interesting to find out which lathe and milling machines he had used. It sounds like they might have been Sherline machines. [4] I wonder how easy it would be today to 3D print a SuperSoaker prototype given the difficulties due to overhangs in the geometry of SuperSoaker parts (e.g. tube, barrel). Something tells me that manually fabricating it on a small lathe/mill like Lonnie Johnson did would be much faster for prototyping than 3D printing, even today ... but I could be wrong.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.black-inventor.com/John-Thompson.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.black-inventor.com/John-Thompson.asp</a>
[3] <a href="http://www.black-inventor.com/Lonnie-G-Johnson.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.black-inventor.com/Lonnie-G-Johnson.asp</a>
[4] <a href="http://sherline.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sherline.com/</a>
As a black man there is no way I can give my kid any toy that looks even remotely like a gun.<p>That a black guy invented this thing makes this even more ironic.
What happened to real Super Soaker guns, like the 50, the 100, or even the 300? When I search for "super soaker" on Amazon I see only a few Nerf branded guns that look like cheap knockoffs.
I remember a 60 minutes or 20/20 type story about him a while back. He was running the R&D lab. I would like to know more about the battery he developed- has that been commercialized?
A couple prior HN discussions on him from when he's previously been in the news:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6702535" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6702535</a> (Super Soaker creator awarded $72.9M from Hasbro)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785189" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785189</a> (Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough)
<p><pre><code> > I went on to design the N-Strike range of Nerf dart guns...
</code></pre>
Maybe having a guy like this design them is why they're so awesome. Those things are accurate at a surprisingly long range, in a package the size of your palm. I was quite impressed with the one I used.
as a kid my favorite Super Soaker was the one that had a backpack as the reservoir. It was threaded just like a garden hose, so I would hook the gun up to the hose instead.