I'm sure much has been written about the inventor, Lonnie Johnson, already, but if he were a young kid today -- or, perhaps, had more coverage for inventing a billion dollar toy -- he'd be as revered as Elon Musk by HN, for being both a rich entrepreneur and an esteemed hacker. From the OP:<p>> <i>Johnson, a nuclear engineer, Tuskegee University Ph.D. and former NASA scientist, founded his company in 1989. It was the same year he first licensed the Super Soaker, which generated more than $200 million in retail sales two years later, the company said. The toy was licensed to Larami Corp., which was later purchased by Hasbro.</i><p>> <i>Johnson holds more than 80 patents, with more than 20 pending, the company said, which said sales of the Super Soaker have approached nearly $1 billion.</i><p>> <i>As an Alabama high school senior, Johnson finished building a remote-controlled robot with a reel-to-reel tape player for a brain and jukebox solenoids controlling its pneumatic limbs, according to a 2008 profile in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.</i><p>edit: This 2001 NYT profile is even more fascinating:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-play-lonnie-johnson-rocket-science-served-up-soggy.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/engineer-at-play-l...</a><p>> <i>In the late 1970's, he worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, overseeing the safety of projects involving space nuclear power.</i><p>> <i>In 1979, he moved to California and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an aerospace mecca.</i><p>> <i>There his nuclear skills helped integrate an atomic power plant into Galileo, a $1.6 billion spacecraft destined to study Jupiter and its 16 moons. It needed an atomic battery because sunlight would be too weak there to power solar panels.</i><p>> <i>David M. Durham, a spacecraft engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recalled that Mr. Johnson was known not only for professional excellence but for testing his wife's patience with his moonlighting.</i><p>> <i>''At one point, his wife nearly threw him out of the house because all he did was tinker,'' he said. After minor successes with inventions, he added, Mr. Johnson finally ''came up with one that allowed him to no longer have to work for anybody.''</i><p>> <i>It happened in 1982 while Mr. Johnson was working at home on a new kind of cooling device. At that time, refrigerators often used Freon, a gas that destroys the earth's ozone layer. He envisioned one that ran on water. It would not only be efficient but would also be environmentally friendly.</i>