By Chris Barton
The true story of the NASA engineer who set out to build a better refrigerator and accidentally invented the Super Soaker.
Lonnie Johnson grew up in Mobile, Alabama, taking things apart to see what was inside. He built rockets in the backyard. He built a robot named Linex out of jukebox switches and his little sister's walkie-talkie, and he programmed it with a tape recorder, so the spinning reels looked like eyes. In 1968 he took Linex to the science fair at the University of Alabama and won first place. He was the only Black student in the competition. He went on to Tuskegee, and then to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on the Galileo probe that flew all the way to Jupiter. And then one evening at home he was tinkering with a cooling system that used water instead of Freon, and he hooked it up to his bathroom sink, and the water shot clear across the room. He stood there looking at the wet wall and thought that would make a great water gun. Then came years of nobody wanting it. The Super Soaker turned out to be one of the best-selling toys ever made.
Most invention books hand a child the finished thing. This one hands them the years in between, which is where the actual work lives. Johnson's Super Soaker sat unwanted for years while he kept knocking on doors, and Barton lets that stretch feel as long as it really was, so persistence stops being a poster word and becomes a thing your child watches someone do. It also helps that the payoff is a toy they can picture in their own hands. Don Tate's art is broad and funny and keeps a 32-page biography moving at the pace of a story rather than a report. For a child who says science is boring, this is the one to try, because it starts at a bathroom sink.