The Beyond Black History Month Person of the day is Lonnie G. Johnson is an engineer and inventor who worked on the Cassini mission to Jupiter and invented the Super Soaker. African-American engineer and inventor Lonnie G. Johnson was born in Alabama in 1949. After graduating from Tuskegee University with a masters degree, Johnson joined the U.S. Air Force and was assigned to the Strategic Air Command, where he helped develop the stealth bomber program. His other assignments included working as a systems engineer for the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn. Johnson also created the Super Soaker squirt gun, which became one of the most popular toys in the world. Lonnie George Johnson was born on October 6, 1949, in Mobile, Alabama. His father was a World War II veteran who worked as a civilian driver at nearby Air Force bases, while his mother worked in a laundry and as a nurses aid. During the summers, both of Johnsons parents also picked cotton on his grandfathers farm. Out of both interest and economic necessity, Johnsons father was a skilled handyman who taught his children to build their own toys. When Johnson was still a small boy, he and his dad built a pressurized Chinaberry shooter out of bamboo shoots. At the age of 13, Johnson attached a lawnmower engine to a go-cart he built from junkyard scraps and raced it along the highway until the police pulled him over. Johnson dreamed of becoming a famous inventor and, during his teenage years, began to grow more curious about the way things worked and more ambitious in his experimentation—sometimes to the detriment of his family. Lonnie tore up his sisters baby doll to see what made the eyes close, his mother later recalled. Another time, he nearly burned the house down when he attempted to cook up rocket fuel in one of his mothers saucepans and the concoction exploded. Growing up in Mobile in the days of legal segregation and pervasive racism, Johnson attended Williamson High School, an all-black facility, where, despite his precocious intelligence and creativity, he was told not to aspire beyond a career as a technician. Nevertheless, inspired by the story of famed African-American inventor George Washington Carver, Johnson persevered in his dream of becoming an inventor.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 05:14:23 +0000
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