Getting a super reaction for the Toy Hall of Fame

It's not often a nuclear engineer invents one of the most popular toys of all time.

Super Soaker, recently inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., was the brainchild of Lonnie Johnson — who came up with the water toy idea in 1982 when developing a heat pump to preheat water entering residential shower heads.

At the time, Johnson was working on the nuclear energy innards of NASA's Galileo spacecraft that eventually orbited the planet Jupiter.

“I was working on my heat pump project at night and during the day I worked on Galileo,” Johnson recalled in a recent phone interview. He was trying to replace fluorocarbon heat exchange fluid with water and had hooked up the nozzle to his bathroom faucet when a water jet streaming across the room gave him the idea for the high-powered toy water blaster.

Johnson's prototype Super Soaker was made of PVC pipe, a PET bottle, nylon tubing and machined acrylic components. He licensed the design in 1989 to Larami Corp., now part of Hasbro Inc., and the toy rapidly became a hit. Sales have since approached $1 billion. The toy now is made in China from injection molded polystyrene with a polypropylene bottle. The concept also led to the Nerf water gun toys, which Johnson developed for Hasbro.

Johnson formed his own company in Atlanta and continued to develop toys, consumer products and advanced energy devices. Over the years he has been granted more than 80 patents. Now he focuses on an advanced energy system that promises to convert solar energy to electricity at double the efficiency of conventional technology.

Johnson was born in Alabama in 1949. His inventiveness was apparent at an early age — in 1968 as a senior in high school he won first place in the Alabama State Science Fair. The graduate of Tuskegee University has since garnered numerous awards, including induction into the State of Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame in 2011.

Chris Bensch, vice president for collections at the Strong museum, said in a news release on the toys selected for the Hall of Fame: “Fun with Super Soakers yields several dividends: exercise in the chases and brain-training while calculating vectors to moving targets and improvising tactics on the fly. Getting soaked in the process adds up to good, clean fun.”

Also named to the Toy Hall of Fame for 2015 on Nov. 5 were the game Twister, developed in 1964, and puppets, which have been childhood mainstays for centuries.