Quotes from Lonnie Johnson

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.

Peer review is fine, as long as you're making incremental improvements to a technology.

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.

I consider myself a general practitioner. I do electronic things. I do toys and water things, mechanical stuff. I'm very, very flexible.

I have a collection of SuperSoakers. I have managed to keep most of them.

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

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.

Sitting still, a person produces about 100 watts of heat. What if you could use that to charge your cell phone?

In 1975, I was called to active duty in the Air Force, studying U.S. space launches that used nuclear power. I felt it was a big deal to be involved in such an important project - we were providing technical support for launch recommendations that ultimately went to the president.

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.

When I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in the early '80s is when I first got the idea. The Super Soaker was based on some engineering principles that I applied. I was actually working on another invention which was a heat pump that would use water as a working fluid instead of Freon.

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.

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

I received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, then graduated with a masters in nuclear engineering.

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.

I've always liked to tinker with things.

I didn't want to grow old and find that I didn't do what I could have done, that I didn't put my best foot forward. I didn't want to have any regrets.

I wound up getting offered a job at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I invented a power supply mechanism for the Galileo space craft which was in orbit around Jupiter until 2003.

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.

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.

After I graduated from Tuskegee with a masters in nuclear engineering, the draft was on so I signed up for ROTC. I figured if I had to go into the military, I'd rather go in as an officer.

I think America's strength is in innovation.

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.