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Lonnie Johnson: A Brief Biography

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Lonnie George. Johnson is a former Air Force and NASA engineer who invented the massively popular super soaker water gun. Lonnie was born on October 6, 1949 in mobile, Alabama. When he was in high school his buddies gave him a nickname “The Professor”. Lonnie was the only African American that represented his high school in 1968 science fair sponsored by the junior engineering technical society (JETS). He earned his Master’s Degree in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee university. Lonnie was inspired by his own father because his father was a skilled handyman who taught his own children to build their own toys. When Lonnie was still a small boy, he and his dad built a pressurized chinaberry shooter out of bamboo shoots. Lonnie built is own invention when he was just 13 he attached a lawnmower engine to a go-kart he built from junkyard scraps and raced it along the highway until the police pulled him over. When Lonnie was growing he dreamed of become a famous inventor. During his teenage years, he began to grow more curious about the way things worked and more ambitious in his experimentation. Lonnie use to tore up his sister’s baby doll to see …show more content…

Later, in 2011 Lonnie went in to the Hall of Fame into the state of Alabama Engineering. Two years later, Johnson received a $73 million settlement from Hasbro Inc., which had acquired Larami Corp a decade earlier. The inventor had been getting additional royalty payments from 2007 through 2012. Johnson and his wife, Linda Moore, have four children. The family is now living in the Ansley park neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. One more thing that Johnson say’s is this is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war still be with you. This quote really inspires

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