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Super Soakers and Rocket Science

Published Aug 10, 2022, 8:10 PM

How did a nuclear engineer end up inventing the Super Soaker water gun? This is the story of Lonnie Johnson, an inventor and engineer who, among many other things, revolutionized the backyard water pistol fight.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you? And since it's summertime, when the weather is high and you can reach right up and touch the sky, I figure I could talk about a fun story about invention and innovation. Uh, something that's near and dear to my heart because these things came out right when I was in high school and I thought they were amazing. I want to talk about the super Soaker line of water guns, and not just because that's a toy that has a special place in my heart because I loved these things when I was a kid, but also because it comes from one heck of a pedigree, because that technology was the brain child of a rocket scientist, a NASA engineer. That engineer would be Lonnie Johnson, a man who is countless incredible achievements to his name. He's got more than a hundred patents to his name. Admittedly, the super soccer bit frequently grabs attention first, although when you look at his resume, you think, how did this? How was this the lead? How was that the headline Lonnie Johnson was born in Mobile, Alabama in ninety nine. And I want to mention this right off the bat, Nie Johnson's black. And I say that because we have to take into account that along the way he was facing massive challenges in the form of systemic racism. So his achievements are incredible, and you on top of that, you have to put into uh take into account rather this issue of racism. Uh, you know, he he was really facing some enormous obs nicles. Well, Lonnie's father was a veteran of World War Two and worked as a civilian driver at an Air Force base in Mobile, Alabama, and his mother worked in a laundry and as a nurse's aid. So when he was a kid, Lonnie became interested in learning how stuff works. I can identify with that. His father, on top of being a driver, was also kind of a d I Y kind of fella. It was mostly out of necessity, learning how to fix things and occasionally you know, doing odd jobs and stuff. And he passed down this d I Y you know, philosophy to his children, and Lonnie really took that to heart, and sometimes his heart would overrule his head, Like the time he was thirteen and decided to take an engine out of a lawnmower and connected to a go kart he had made out of scraps and then went joy riding down the highway. Police had to ask him to pull over. Probably not the safest activity for a thirteen year old to pursue, but it was a demonstration of his his love of engineering, and his family told lots of stories of Lonnie taking stuff apart to learn how it worked, and of course, you know, it was the classic story that he wasn't always able to put it back together again. So sometimes when Lonnie got his hands on something, that was the last time that something was gonna work, but he would learn in the process. They also told stories about the time he tried to make homemade rocket fuel and nearly set his family's house on fire. He would go to Williamson High School, and that was an all black high school because this was still in the days of segregation here in the South. You know, you you had class schools that were whites only, in schools that were black so only. And so he went to an all black high school. In nineteen sixty eight, he in his school entered a science fair competition that was held at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and his school was the only black school that was in attendance at the fair. And he Johnson had created a kind of robot. He called it the Lennox, and it was an air powered device. Again made out of scrap materials, like he had rated junkyards and stuff and grabbed things that would be helpful and made this robot and it took home first prize. Now, reportedly, many at the university were not thrilled that the top prize was going to a black student. Johnson earned a scholarship to attend the Tuskegee University and there he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. He got that degree in nineteen seventy three. Then he pursued post graduate studies at Tuskegee and he earned a master's degree in nuclear engineering in nineteen seventy five. So the guy who who created the super soccer has a master's in nuclear your engineering. That's a big old while Zephoria right, like, you wouldn't expect that when you pick up a toy that this was created by a nuclear engineer. Now, for a short while after he graduated from his master's degree. Lonnie Johnson worked as a research engineer at oak Ridge National Laboratory. That was one of the facilities that was involved during the Manhattan Project. It was established as part of the Manhattan Project. In fact, this was when the United States was first developing the atomic bomb during World War Two. Of course, that would be ancient history by the time Lonnie Johnson had joined the team, but oak Ridge continues to pioneer research in things like nuclear physics, including nuclear fusion and an attempt to build a working nuclear fusion reactor, which if we ever managed to do one that actually creates a sustainable fusion reaction, uh, that would be transformative for our energy needs, but you know, we have to get there first. Well. Johnson would then join the Air Force after that and he was assigned to head the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. He stayed there until nineteen seventy nine, and at that point he joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and served as a senior systems engineer. He began work on the Galileo project, so he was he was part of the Galileo project team. Galileo was a probe that we sent to study Jupiter and its moons. That project would ultimately be monumentally successful from a scientific perspective. Now, Johnson worked on this early on in the program. He would not be part of that team when the probe would ultimately launched later in the nineteen eighties, but he did work on it early on. In Night two, Lonnie Johnson would actually leave NASA and returned to the Air Force and he was now an Advanced Space Systems Requirements Officer at the Strategic Air Command Headquarters. He would also serve as the chief of the Data Management branch of Strategic Air Command Test and Evaluation Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base. He was one of the engineers who would also work on the development of the Stealth bomber, which was a super secret project at the time. Johnson actually talked about how he wouldn't even be able to tell his wife what he was working on at the time because it was classified as top secret. He would pop back over to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nineteen seven to work on the Cassini project. Cassini was a probe that we sent to study Saturn, and he was also at work on a project that would unexpectedly evolve into the super Soaker. Now, that was something that he had been kind of working on on and off for several years. You see, Lonnie Johnson did not set out to make a new kind of water gun, you know, a water gun that would leave those little old squirt guns far behind. He wasn't trying to create a weapon of mass saturation. It was not his dream to grant battlefield superiority to the kid who could go out and buy a water gun capable of shooting streams of water further than any other on the market. Hy Johnson was trying to do something else entirely. He was trying to solve a very tricky problem. He wanted to create a heat pump that used water instead of free on as a refrigerant. And he started on this work way back in the early nineteen eighties. So he he did this while he was at the Air Force working on the Stealth bomber. So he couldn't talk about the stealth bomber work, but he could talk about his sort of personal project, which was trying to suss out if there would be a way to make a working heat pump and effective heat pump using water. So we're going to talk about heat pumps and how they work and why it was important to try and find an alternative to free on so that we can have an understanding of what it was that was fueling his innovation and ultimately would spawn the super soaker. But before we get to all of that, let's take a quick break. Okay, let's talk about heat pumps. Uh. Now, the heat pumps I'm talking about here, they work in a way that's similar to an air conditioner. In fact, there are several elements in heat pumps that are identical to things you would find in an air conditioner, except a heat pump can potentially transfer heat inside a building or outside of building. Thus it can either heat or cool a building use in one system. Air conditioners are not like that. They are a one way thing, right. They pull heat out of a building and they bring cool air in. But that's it. You can't you can't heat a building with an air conditioner. You need a separate system. You need a furnace. So a heat bump can do both and uh, technically, a heat pump can also be a one way type of deal. It could also be like an air conditioner if or it could be like a furnace if you wanted where it could not reverse. The reverse is only made possible by using a reversing valve um. But that's the thing is that a heat pump can do that. You can have a reversing valve installed within the system and you change where the heat is being pumped. Really, that's all it is. It's it's all a heat transfer system. It transfers heat from one location to another. When you're heating a building, it means you're taking heat from outside and bringing it inside. Then when you're cooling a building, you're taking the heat from inside and you're putting it outside. That's really all there is to it. But how does it do that well? I could technically do a full episode about this, but I'll try and keep it short. It's also a little tricky to talk about when you don't have visual aids, but we're gonna do our best. So your typical air to air heat pump solution, there are a lot of different types of heat pumps. Will talk about air to air because one they're the most common, and too they're really simple. But your your basic air to air heat pump solution consists of a pair of heat exchangers. You have one heat exchanger that's outdoors and you have one heat exchanger that's indoors. These are connected via pipes and a reversing valve that allows the flow to reverse directions, and there's a compressor, and there's also some other valves, expansion valves that control the flow of refrigerant in the system, and bypasses for those expansion valves. That's also important. So I'll talk about expansion valve one and two for the sake of this description so that you can understand why they exist. And really you only need to if you do have a reversing heat pump system. If it's just going in one direction, you just need an one expansion pump and that's it. You don't even have to have a bypass. It's only if you want to both heat and cool a building with a heat pump that you would need two of them. So let's start with the compressor, because really that's where the journey begins, and the compressor's job is to compress the refrigerant that's flowing through this system. Now compressing a fluid in this case, it's it's essentially a vapor. It causes not just the pressure to increase, but it also causes the temperature of that fluid to increase. So what you end up with is a superheated vapor under very high pressure, and you allow that to travel through the lines from the compressor. And let's say in this case, it's the winter and we want to heat the inside of our house, so we would have a system set so that the hot, high pressure vapor travels to the indoor heat exchanger. Now, this is essentially coils of tube being made out of a material that conducts heat efficiently, like copper, right. So this super high pressure, very hot vapor goes through these coils of tubing. Behind the coil of tubing, you have a fan. The fan blows cooler air across these hot coils, and that carries some of that thermal energy, some of that heat away from the coils. That's what's providing the heat to the house. That's where the warm air is coming out of the vents. It's because that air was blown across these very hot coils, and some of that heat transferred to the air and thus is warming your house. So the cool air starts to pull away some of that thermal energy. Well, as the thermal energy goes down inside this this fluid, then the fluid itself begins to condense. It begins to convert from gas to liquid. And it's still hot, it's still had a high pressure. It's just not quite as high a pressure as it was when it entered into the heat exchanger, and it's not quite as hot as it was. But this heated liquid will bypass expansion valve number one, So it goes around this valve, it doesn't go through it. The expansion valve. If you can think of it as as pointing in the direction, it's pointing back the way this liquid has come. So it bypasses this valve. Then it goes through expansion valve number two that's pointed in the opposite way. Now, an expansion valve allows this pressurized liquid to expand, for its volume to expand. Well, that means is that the pressure of the liquid drops suddenly, as does its temperature. That that's the relationship here. When you've got high pressure, you've got high temperature. When you've got low pressure, you've got low temperature. So this expansion valve allows for the rapid expansion of this liquid into a kind of a mixture of liquid and vapor that is much cooler in temperature. This mixture then passes through the coils in the outdoor heat exchanger that's just blowing ambient air across the coils. Well, the temperature of the refrigerant has now dropped so low that even in the wintertime, the air outside is typically warmer than the refrigerant is, so it can be very cold outside and still be warm enough to warm up the refrigerant quite a bit. And so a little bit of thermal energy gets transferred into this fluid. The refrigerant then brings along some of that the more energy, and it gets pumped back through the reversing valve to go back into the compressor, and then the whole thing starts up again. Right, the compressor compresses this mixture of of vapor and liquid that's cooler into a high pressure vapor that is very high temperature and puts it back through the system again. Now, if you wanted to cool your house this this this whole system moves in reverse. So the compressor still compresses the refrigerants, still makes it very hot, but now it goes to the outdoor heat exchanger, which takes away some of that thermal energy and allows the superheated high pressure vapor to condense into hot, slightly less hot, and slightly less pressurized liquid that then bypasses expansion valve two. It goes to expansion valve one, expands into the very low pressure, low temperature mixture of vapor and liquid, moves through the indoor heat exchanger, which is blowing warm air across these coils. The coils are very very cold, so then you get cool air blowing into your house, and then the fluid continues on back to the compressor. Now, the reason I give all that is because you know, you have to understand those basic pieces. But why was Johnson working on an improvement or attempting to create an improved heat bump. Well, it's because the typical heat bump was using free on as the refrigerant. Now free on is technically called die chlora die flora methane, and this stuff has the useful trait of having a boiling point that's all the way down to minus twenty nine point eight celsius or minus twenty one point six four fahrenheit. Now, remember, like water has got a boiling point of a hundred degrees celsius or two D twelve fahrenheit. That's pretty hot, but free on it'll boil off into a gas at negative twenty nine point eight celsius. So you see that even in cold winters, there's still enough heat in the ambient air to boil off the refrigerant in the heat exchanger. Unless you're in like a super duper cold environment where you would be kind of stuck, the heat pump would not be a big help. However, free on has some drawbacks. Now. A big drawback is that it contributes to environmental damage. It can it is a chemical that, when released into the atmosphere, can do massive damage to the ozone layer. Now, this was such a concern in the nine nineties that countries agreed to ban the manufacturer of free on. First developed nations all agreed to stop manufacturing free on in the mid nineties, but for developing countries it was considered to be kind of I mean, it's it's looked on as a complicated situation. Right. You you have a country that's on its way toward development telling it, hey, you can't benefit from the same stuff that we benefited from because it turns out that's harmful. That's a complicated thing. So those countries actually had until to stop making free on. These days, we still use free on, but only in very specific use cases, like as a fire retardant in like submarines or aircraft. So Lonnie Johnson wanted to create a new kind of heat pump that would just use lane old water as a refrigerant instead of free on. So there was this growing concern about free on and similar chemicals and their environmental impact, but this was before countries had decided to ban the stuff, and so really Johnson was just trying to think of an alternative that would be you know, practical and uh, you know, have less of an environmental impact, and water would definitely fit the bill if you could make it work. So he's kind of thinking this through and creating a system, and part of that meant that he machined his own nozzles. So he used machining equipment to make nozzles for his heat pump design, and one day, while testing out his nozzles in his bathroom, he shot a tight stream of water clear across the bathroom in a very focused stream, and then got into thinking about water guns. Okay, I'm gonna talk more about water guns and their design, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about your classic water gun. So this is pretty super soaker, the little squirt toy versions of water guns, the kinds of that you might find in like a dollar store or something. Now, your typical water gun has a spring loaded trigger, and that trigger activates a lever. That lever in turn activates a very small pump inside the water gun, and the pumps job is to pump water from a reservoir and the gun. Often with the squirt guns, the entire interior of the gun acts as a reservoir and it pumps the water through a plastic tube and out a narrow path at the end of the gun's barrel, where a nozzle focuses the escaping water into a stream. So let's take that step by step to understand exactly what's working from a mechanical perspective. So, you've got your plastic tube that extends into the water reservoir. If you follow that plastic tube from the reservoir up, you'll see that leads to a pump. And the pump is a very simple thing it's a cylinder and it's a piston, and the piston, when you pull the trigger, will move into the cylinder. Now, when the piston moves into the cylinder, it forces water or air or whatever out of the cylinder, right, It can't be in the cylinder of the pistons. There. Also, inside the cylinder is a spring, So the piston enters the cylinder, it compresses the spring, and when you release the trigger, it allows the spring to expand to full size. That forces the piston back out of the cylinder again. And when that happens, there's a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. So water and or air flows back into the cylinder because it's been left empty by the pistons movement. Right. So when you pair this with a couple of one way valves in those tubes, you have yourself an effective pump. So one of those valves will allow water to move from the reservoir into the cylinder. So when you let go of the trigger and the piston is moving out of the cylinder, the pump sucks water up from the tube, but the water cannot flow back in the opposite direction. This is also why you sometimes have to prime the old water pistols, you have to pull the trigger a few times because you actually have to use that that piston to suction water up from a reservoir to go into the pump uh in order to have it ready to push the water out of the gun. Now, the other one way valve leads from the pump to the nozzle in the guns barrel. So when you pull the trigger, it pushes the piston through the cylinder, forces water out of the pump, and the only place the water can go is through this tube, through that one way valve and out through the nozzle because the other one way valve blocks the water from going back into the reservoir. Now, because there is a one way valve right there heading to the barrel of the gun, that means when you let go of the trigger and you have the suction ng action happening again, when the piston is moving out of the cylinder, that one way valve seals shut, so air cannot come back in through the gun barrel. The only place where the section can pull anything through is through the reservoir. Because that one way valve allows water to go from the reservoir back into the pump. You have to have those one way valves or else if you were to lego of the trigger and it could just pull air from the barrel, then you wouldn't suction air up how the reservoir anymore. You can have a full water gun and keep pulling that trigger and nothing happens because all it's doing is pushing air in and out through the barrel of the gun. You have to have that valve there to help seal the system properly. Now that's your basic squirt gun. Johnson figured he could do a bit better now. His help made nozzle was just one part of his new invention, of course, and Johnson wouldn't work on this all on his own. He would kind of work with another inventor named Bruce Dandrade to kind of get a better squirt gun design. And a big part of it was something that heat pumps deal with all the time, which is pressurizing a fluid. Now, obviously a toy water gun is not going to create the same levels of pressurization as an industrial compressor in a heat exchange system. That would be bonkers. But a pressurization chamber would provide the oomph to force water out at a high velocity through the nozzle, which means you could shoot streams of water much further than your standard little squirt gun. So the idea was you'd use a hand pump on the gun to pump air into this pressurization chamber, at least originally. Later models of supersoakers would actually use water and air rather than just air to build up pressure. Valves would prevent the air from escaping back out, so you would pump air in, but the air could not escape out, and you just keep pumping and pumping until you had essentially reached capacity of the canistry. You you could not physically move the pump any further. Later on, you would even have fail safe so that it wouldn't allow you to pump anymore once it reached a certain amount of pressure, and that way would be less likely to break your new toy. When you pulled the trigger, you would essentially open up an escape valve for all that pressurized air that was inside this canister, and the air having a path of release, would immediately follow it, and there's only one path available because of those valves. It would only be able to go in one direction, and this escaping air would end up pushing water out of a secondary reservoir in the gun through the nozzle at the end, shooting a stream at an impressive distance. Now, it's a little more complicated than I just described. So, like I said, there are two water reservoirs. The first reservoir, the primary one, is the one you would actually fill up when you would get ready to do battle. You would open up a little uh tab in the gun. You would fill it up with water and you close the tab in there. That was the primary water reservoir. The second water reservoir would fill up as you were pumping pressurized air into the compression and chamber, and it was the water in this secondary reservoir that would actually shoot out the nozzle when you pulled the trigger. So when the pressurized air was released, it was pushing water out through this secondary reservoir, not the primary one. And again you would use one way valves to control fluid flow. That guaranteed that fluids would only be able to go in one direction throughout this system. Because if you don't have that, then you just really have a water gun where water is slashing through tubes but not really going anywhere. Now, Johnson initially looked to self fund production of his invention, and he gave his daughter a prototype of this kind of using like a two leader empty soda bottle to act as the compression chamber. And then he watched as his seven year old daughter was absolutely wrecking shot on that Air Force base. She was just dominant in any water gun fights. However, he discovered that manufacturing is a complicated and expensive process. I mean, it costs a lot of money to first establish a production sequence, right if you're building something new, then you have to go through and tool that sequence precisely to whatever it is you're building, and that's very expensive. So Johnson didn't have like two thousand bucks just lying around to fund an initial batch of a thousand super soakers. So instead he started to look around to see if he could find a toy company that he could partner with. But that took a long time. And you have to keep in mind that while he's doing this, he's also kind of working on stuff like stealth bombers, and so it's not like he had copious amounts of free time on his hands to pursue his dream of making a really cool squirt gun. So his search took seven years. He happened to encounter a toy company while he was at the American International Toy Fair in New York. He was there with you know, his his pitch, and he got some interest from a Philadelphia based company called Laramie. Now that company didn't exactly have the best image in the toy world. It was mostly known for making knockoffs of popular toy brands. But Laramie was showing an interest and that was enough for Johnson because he was not really finding any bites at this point. So he was invited to travel to Philadelphia and to give a demonstration of his prototype, which again used like an empty two leader soda bottle as the compression chamber. So you know, it was this Jankee collection of plastic and tubes and this soda bottle. It didn't necessarily look really polished itself, and the Laramie folks were saying, well, does it work? And then he shot water clear across the conference room and he immediately won the admiration of the Laramie executives and they struck a deal with Johnson. They licensed the design of his invention, and so that was that. That was where Johnson ended up getting the this lucrative licensing deal for his his invention, which by the way, he had already patented. Laramie would produce the first model of this which it wasn't called the super Soaker when it first came out. This was around so this model was called Deep Power Drencher, and I think that's just as awesome a name is super Soaker. It's not alliterative. So that's an issue that Power Drencher does sound like, it's like it's a force to be reckoned with. But the next year was when the company would rebrand the toy as the super Soaker, and that name stuck, and it also became insanely popular. Like you occasionally see these trends and toys where a toy will just be like the must have toy of the season. That was what the super Soaker was. When it really debuted under that name, it was they were flying off store shelves. People were crazy about them, including me, and I did have an original super Soaker, uh, not the Power Drencher, but when it was rebranded. I did have one of those when I was a kid, and I love that thing now. In an interview with the Henry Ford Innovation Nation, Johnson said that it took some engineering to bring all the elements together to make this work. Uh. But when you compare it to rocket science, it's relatively simple, which you know, I gotta say, I love that perspective. Hasbro would subsequently acquire Laramie, so the super Soaker brand would move over to Hasbro. Johnson would head on back to NASA. Uh. He you know, I'd worked at the Air Force. He had made a killing by licensing this invention to Laramie, and then wanted to continue his his engineering work with NASA. And then after that he worked a little bit with Hasbro to bring new innovations and improvements to its line of NERF guns. In fact, Hasbro would group super Soaker under the NERF brand, so you find Nerve Supersoakers these days. Uh. And and it's that's kind of funny too, because actually, when Johnson was a kid, I didn't mention this earlier. That he created a kind of proto NERF gun back in his childhood. Used uh, some bamboo to act as kind of like a barrel of a gun, and he used China berries as ammunition, these little soft berry things that grow all over the place here in the Southeast and use pressurized air to shoot them, so it was kind of like kind of like a NERF gun, just it was shooting china berries instead a little foam darts. And Johnson created his own design laboratory right here in Atlanta, Georgia called Johnson R and D. And they're at the lab. Johnson and his team are researching all sorts of fields, including environmental technology for alternative power generation solutions, which is pretty darn awesome, as well as for the super socer. It would continue to evolve under hasbro uh Dandrade would incorporate a type of bladder in future supersocer water guns, and the bladder would serve both as kind of a pressure chamber and a water reservoir. When you would pump the supersocer that had these bladders in them, it would force water and air into this bladder, thus expanding the bladder. But the bladder was made of very stiff material and it resisted having this stuff pumped into it, So you would get this compression, this pressurization, that interior pressure would grow and when you pull the trigger, it would allow the pressure to escape and you could, you know, have longer pressure with these types of supersocer so you could fire it a few more times than having to, like, you know, pump for five seconds and then fire and then pump for five seconds again. These days, they are actually a several different Supersocer models, I mean, tons have come out since it debuted. In a lot of the current Supersoaker models actually use a a simpler pump mechanism. Some of them are are just essentially sucking up water into a pump and then pushing it out in high volumes. So in other words, it's working on a very similar principle as those older squirt guns. It's just larger. Your pump is bigger inside these types of guns instead of being a little bitty thing that's a spring activated trigger mechanism. It's typically like a pump handlem mechanism. But it's still when you break it down, a simple pump and not using a pressurized container like the original Supersocer did. Others use motorized pumps, so you have like a battery operated pump that fires the water in the reservoir. But all of these gut their start thanks to a rocket scientist who just want to make a better heat pump. And that's it for this episode. I wanted to give Lonnie Johnson a shout out. The guy is incredibly inspiring you. If you are not familiar with his work, you'd need to look him up. Um not just the supersoker stuff. He also just comes across incredibly personable in interviews. He is humble and inquisitive and curious and very very fun to listen to. So I highly recommend you check them out if you have not before, and if you would like to suggest a topic for me to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, there are a couple of different ways you can do that. One is to download the iHeart Radio app. It's free to download. Navigate over to the tech Stuff portion of that, and there's a little microphone icon there where you can leave a thirty second voice message up to thirty seconds anyway, doesn't have to be a full thirty seconds, and let me know what you would like me to cover in the future, or you can drop me a line on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

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