Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And
Speaker 1: how the tech are you? And since it's summertime, when
Speaker 1: the weather is high and you can reach right up
Speaker 1: and touch the sky, I figure I could talk about
Speaker 1: a fun story about invention and innovation. Uh, something that's
Speaker 1: near and dear to my heart because these things came
Speaker 1: out right when I was in high school and I
Speaker 1: thought they were amazing. I want to talk about the
Speaker 1: super Soaker line of water guns, and not just because
Speaker 1: that's a toy that has a special place in my
Speaker 1: heart because I loved these things when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: but also because it comes from one heck of a pedigree,
Speaker 1: because that technology was the brain child of a rocket scientist,
Speaker 1: a NASA engineer. That engineer would be Lonnie Johnson, a
Speaker 1: man who is countless incredible achievements to his name. He's
Speaker 1: got more than a hundred patents to his name. Admittedly,
Speaker 1: the super soccer bit frequently grabs attention first, although when
Speaker 1: you look at his resume, you think, how did this?
Speaker 1: How was this the lead? How was that the headline
Speaker 1: Lonnie Johnson was born in Mobile, Alabama in ninety nine.
Speaker 1: And I want to mention this right off the bat,
Speaker 1: Nie Johnson's black. And I say that because we have
Speaker 1: to take into account that along the way he was
Speaker 1: facing massive challenges in the form of systemic racism. So
Speaker 1: his achievements are incredible, and you on top of that,
Speaker 1: you have to put into uh take into account rather
Speaker 1: this issue of racism. Uh, you know, he he was
Speaker 1: really facing some enormous obs nicles. Well, Lonnie's father was
Speaker 1: a veteran of World War Two and worked as a
Speaker 1: civilian driver at an Air Force base in Mobile, Alabama,
Speaker 1: and his mother worked in a laundry and as a
Speaker 1: nurse's aid. So when he was a kid, Lonnie became
Speaker 1: interested in learning how stuff works. I can identify with that.
Speaker 1: His father, on top of being a driver, was also
Speaker 1: kind of a d I Y kind of fella. It
Speaker 1: was mostly out of necessity, learning how to fix things
Speaker 1: and occasionally you know, doing odd jobs and stuff. And
Speaker 1: he passed down this d I Y you know, philosophy
Speaker 1: to his children, and Lonnie really took that to heart,
Speaker 1: and sometimes his heart would overrule his head, Like the
Speaker 1: time he was thirteen and decided to take an engine
Speaker 1: out of a lawnmower and connected to a go kart
Speaker 1: he had made out of scraps and then went joy
Speaker 1: riding down the highway. Police had to ask him to
Speaker 1: pull over. Probably not the safest activity for a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old to pursue, but it was a demonstration of
Speaker 1: his his love of engineering, and his family told lots
Speaker 1: of stories of Lonnie taking stuff apart to learn how
Speaker 1: it worked, and of course, you know, it was the
Speaker 1: classic story that he wasn't always able to put it
Speaker 1: back together again. So sometimes when Lonnie got his hands
Speaker 1: on something, that was the last time that something was
Speaker 1: gonna work, but he would learn in the process. They
Speaker 1: also told stories about the time he tried to make
Speaker 1: homemade rocket fuel and nearly set his family's house on fire.
Speaker 1: He would go to Williamson High School, and that was
Speaker 1: an all black high school because this was still in
Speaker 1: the days of segregation here in the South. You know,
Speaker 1: you you had class schools that were whites only, in
Speaker 1: schools that were black so only. And so he went
Speaker 1: to an all black high school. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: he in his school entered a science fair competition that
Speaker 1: was held at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and
Speaker 1: his school was the only black school that was in
Speaker 1: attendance at the fair. And he Johnson had created a
Speaker 1: kind of robot. He called it the Lennox, and it
Speaker 1: was an air powered device. Again made out of scrap materials,
Speaker 1: like he had rated junkyards and stuff and grabbed things
Speaker 1: that would be helpful and made this robot and it
Speaker 1: took home first prize. Now, reportedly, many at the university
Speaker 1: were not thrilled that the top prize was going to
Speaker 1: a black student. Johnson earned a scholarship to attend the
Speaker 1: Tuskegee University and there he earned a bachelor's degree in
Speaker 1: mechanical engineering. He got that degree in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: Then he pursued post graduate studies at Tuskegee and he
Speaker 1: earned a master's degree in nuclear engineering in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: So the guy who who created the super soccer has
Speaker 1: a master's in nuclear your engineering. That's a big old
Speaker 1: while Zephoria right, like, you wouldn't expect that when you
Speaker 1: pick up a toy that this was created by a
Speaker 1: nuclear engineer. Now, for a short while after he graduated
Speaker 1: from his master's degree. Lonnie Johnson worked as a research
Speaker 1: engineer at oak Ridge National Laboratory. That was one of
Speaker 1: the facilities that was involved during the Manhattan Project. It
Speaker 1: was established as part of the Manhattan Project. In fact,
Speaker 1: this was when the United States was first developing the
Speaker 1: atomic bomb during World War Two. Of course, that would
Speaker 1: be ancient history by the time Lonnie Johnson had joined
Speaker 1: the team, but oak Ridge continues to pioneer research in
Speaker 1: things like nuclear physics, including nuclear fusion and an attempt
Speaker 1: to build a working nuclear fusion reactor, which if we
Speaker 1: ever managed to do one that actually creates a sustainable
Speaker 1: fusion reaction, uh, that would be transformative for our energy needs,
Speaker 1: but you know, we have to get there first. Well.
Speaker 1: Johnson would then join the Air Force after that and
Speaker 1: he was assigned to head the Space Nuclear Power Safety
Speaker 1: Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. He stayed there
Speaker 1: until nineteen seventy nine, and at that point he joined
Speaker 1: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and served as a senior systems engineer.
Speaker 1: He began work on the Galileo project, so he was
Speaker 1: he was part of the Galileo project team. Galileo was
Speaker 1: a probe that we sent to study Jupiter and its moons.
Speaker 1: That project would ultimately be monumentally successful from a scientific perspective. Now,
Speaker 1: Johnson worked on this early on in the program. He
Speaker 1: would not be part of that team when the probe
Speaker 1: would ultimately launched later in the nineteen eighties, but he
Speaker 1: did work on it early on. In Night two, Lonnie
Speaker 1: Johnson would actually leave NASA and returned to the Air
Speaker 1: Force and he was now an Advanced Space Systems Requirements
Speaker 1: Officer at the Strategic Air Command Headquarters. He would also
Speaker 1: serve as the chief of the Data Management branch of
Speaker 1: Strategic Air Command Test and Evaluation Squadron at Edwards Air
Speaker 1: Force Base. He was one of the engineers who would
Speaker 1: also work on the development of the Stealth bomber, which
Speaker 1: was a super secret project at the time. Johnson actually
Speaker 1: talked about how he wouldn't even be able to tell
Speaker 1: his wife what he was working on at the time
Speaker 1: because it was classified as top secret. He would pop
Speaker 1: back over to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nineteen seven
Speaker 1: to work on the Cassini project. Cassini was a probe
Speaker 1: that we sent to study Saturn, and he was also
Speaker 1: at work on a project that would unexpectedly evolve into
Speaker 1: the super Soaker. Now, that was something that he had
Speaker 1: been kind of working on on and off for several years.
Speaker 1: You see, Lonnie Johnson did not set out to make
Speaker 1: a new kind of water gun, you know, a water
Speaker 1: gun that would leave those little old squirt guns far behind.
Speaker 1: He wasn't trying to create a weapon of mass saturation.
Speaker 1: It was not his dream to grant battlefield superiority to
Speaker 1: the kid who could go out and buy a water
Speaker 1: gun capable of shooting streams of water further than any
Speaker 1: other on the market. Hy Johnson was trying to do
Speaker 1: something else entirely. He was trying to solve a very
Speaker 1: tricky problem. He wanted to create a heat pump that
Speaker 1: used water instead of free on as a refrigerant. And
Speaker 1: he started on this work way back in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. So he he did this while he was
Speaker 1: at the Air Force working on the Stealth bomber. So
Speaker 1: he couldn't talk about the stealth bomber work, but he
Speaker 1: could talk about his sort of personal project, which was
Speaker 1: trying to suss out if there would be a way
Speaker 1: to make a working heat pump and effective heat pump
Speaker 1: using water. So we're going to talk about heat pumps
Speaker 1: and how they work and why it was important to
Speaker 1: try and find an alternative to free on so that
Speaker 1: we can have an understanding of what it was that
Speaker 1: was fueling his innovation and ultimately would spawn the super soaker.
Speaker 1: But before we get to all of that, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. Okay, let's talk about heat pumps. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: the heat pumps I'm talking about here, they work in
Speaker 1: a way that's similar to an air conditioner. In fact,
Speaker 1: there are several elements in heat pumps that are identical
Speaker 1: to things you would find in an air conditioner, except
Speaker 1: a heat pump can potentially transfer heat inside a building
Speaker 1: or outside of building. Thus it can either heat or
Speaker 1: cool a building use in one system. Air conditioners are
Speaker 1: not like that. They are a one way thing, right.
Speaker 1: They pull heat out of a building and they bring
Speaker 1: cool air in. But that's it. You can't you can't
Speaker 1: heat a building with an air conditioner. You need a
Speaker 1: separate system. You need a furnace. So a heat bump
Speaker 1: can do both and uh, technically, a heat pump can
Speaker 1: also be a one way type of deal. It could
Speaker 1: also be like an air conditioner if or it could
Speaker 1: be like a furnace if you wanted where it could
Speaker 1: not reverse. The reverse is only made possible by using
Speaker 1: a reversing valve um. But that's the thing is that
Speaker 1: a heat pump can do that. You can have a
Speaker 1: reversing valve installed within the system and you change where
Speaker 1: the heat is being pumped. Really, that's all it is.
Speaker 1: It's it's all a heat transfer system. It transfers heat
Speaker 1: from one location to another. When you're heating a building,
Speaker 1: it means you're taking heat from outside and bringing it inside.
Speaker 1: Then when you're cooling a building, you're taking the heat
Speaker 1: from inside and you're putting it outside. That's really all
Speaker 1: there is to it. But how does it do that well?
Speaker 1: I could technically do a full episode about this, but
Speaker 1: I'll try and keep it short. It's also a little
Speaker 1: tricky to talk about when you don't have visual aids,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna do our best. So your typical air
Speaker 1: to air heat pump solution, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different types of heat pumps. Will talk about air to
Speaker 1: air because one they're the most common, and too they're
Speaker 1: really simple. But your your basic air to air heat
Speaker 1: pump solution consists of a pair of heat exchangers. You
Speaker 1: have one heat exchanger that's outdoors and you have one
Speaker 1: heat exchanger that's indoors. These are connected via pipes and
Speaker 1: a reversing valve that allows the flow to reverse directions,
Speaker 1: and there's a compressor, and there's also some other valves,
Speaker 1: expansion valves that control the flow of refrigerant in the system,
Speaker 1: and bypasses for those expansion valves. That's also important. So
Speaker 1: I'll talk about expansion valve one and two for the
Speaker 1: sake of this description so that you can understand why
Speaker 1: they exist. And really you only need to if you
Speaker 1: do have a reversing heat pump system. If it's just
Speaker 1: going in one direction, you just need an one expansion
Speaker 1: pump and that's it. You don't even have to have
Speaker 1: a bypass. It's only if you want to both heat
Speaker 1: and cool a building with a heat pump that you
Speaker 1: would need two of them. So let's start with the compressor,
Speaker 1: because really that's where the journey begins, and the compressor's
Speaker 1: job is to compress the refrigerant that's flowing through this system.
Speaker 1: Now compressing a fluid in this case, it's it's essentially
Speaker 1: a vapor. It causes not just the pressure to increase,
Speaker 1: but it also causes the temperature of that fluid to increase.
Speaker 1: So what you end up with is a superheated vapor
Speaker 1: under very high pressure, and you allow that to travel
Speaker 1: through the lines from the compressor. And let's say in
Speaker 1: this case, it's the winter and we want to heat
Speaker 1: the inside of our house, so we would have a
Speaker 1: system set so that the hot, high pressure vapor travels
Speaker 1: to the indoor heat exchanger. Now, this is essentially coils
Speaker 1: of tube being made out of a material that conducts
Speaker 1: heat efficiently, like copper, right. So this super high pressure,
Speaker 1: very hot vapor goes through these coils of tubing. Behind
Speaker 1: the coil of tubing, you have a fan. The fan
Speaker 1: blows cooler air across these hot coils, and that carries
Speaker 1: some of that thermal energy, some of that heat away
Speaker 1: from the coils. That's what's providing the heat to the house.
Speaker 1: That's where the warm air is coming out of the vents.
Speaker 1: It's because that air was blown across these very hot coils,
Speaker 1: and some of that heat transferred to the air and
Speaker 1: thus is warming your house. So the cool air starts
Speaker 1: to pull away some of that thermal energy. Well, as
Speaker 1: the thermal energy goes down inside this this fluid, then
Speaker 1: the fluid itself begins to condense. It begins to convert
Speaker 1: from gas to liquid. And it's still hot, it's still
Speaker 1: had a high pressure. It's just not quite as high
Speaker 1: a pressure as it was when it entered into the
Speaker 1: heat exchanger, and it's not quite as hot as it was.
Speaker 1: But this heated liquid will bypass expansion valve number one,
Speaker 1: So it goes around this valve, it doesn't go through it.
Speaker 1: The expansion valve. If you can think of it as
Speaker 1: as pointing in the direction, it's pointing back the way
Speaker 1: this liquid has come. So it bypasses this valve. Then
Speaker 1: it goes through expansion valve number two that's pointed in
Speaker 1: the opposite way. Now, an expansion valve allows this pressurized
Speaker 1: liquid to expand, for its volume to expand. Well, that
Speaker 1: means is that the pressure of the liquid drops suddenly,
Speaker 1: as does its temperature. That that's the relationship here. When
Speaker 1: you've got high pressure, you've got high temperature. When you've
Speaker 1: got low pressure, you've got low temperature. So this expansion
Speaker 1: valve allows for the rapid expansion of this liquid into
Speaker 1: a kind of a mixture of liquid and vapor that
Speaker 1: is much cooler in temperature. This mixture then passes through
Speaker 1: the coils in the outdoor heat exchanger that's just blowing
Speaker 1: ambient air across the coils. Well, the temperature of the
Speaker 1: refrigerant has now dropped so low that even in the wintertime,
Speaker 1: the air outside is typically warmer than the refrigerant is,
Speaker 1: so it can be very cold outside and still be
Speaker 1: warm enough to warm up the refrigerant quite a bit.
Speaker 1: And so a little bit of thermal energy gets transferred
Speaker 1: into this fluid. The refrigerant then brings along some of
Speaker 1: that the more energy, and it gets pumped back through
Speaker 1: the reversing valve to go back into the compressor, and
Speaker 1: then the whole thing starts up again. Right, the compressor
Speaker 1: compresses this mixture of of vapor and liquid that's cooler
Speaker 1: into a high pressure vapor that is very high temperature
Speaker 1: and puts it back through the system again. Now, if
Speaker 1: you wanted to cool your house this this this whole
Speaker 1: system moves in reverse. So the compressor still compresses the refrigerants,
Speaker 1: still makes it very hot, but now it goes to
Speaker 1: the outdoor heat exchanger, which takes away some of that
Speaker 1: thermal energy and allows the superheated high pressure vapor to
Speaker 1: condense into hot, slightly less hot, and slightly less pressurized
Speaker 1: liquid that then bypasses expansion valve two. It goes to
Speaker 1: expansion valve one, expands into the very low pressure, low
Speaker 1: temperature mixture of vapor and liquid, moves through the indoor
Speaker 1: heat exchanger, which is blowing warm air across these coils.
Speaker 1: The coils are very very cold, so then you get
Speaker 1: cool air blowing into your house, and then the fluid
Speaker 1: continues on back to the compressor. Now, the reason I
Speaker 1: give all that is because you know, you have to
Speaker 1: understand those basic pieces. But why was Johnson working on
Speaker 1: an improvement or attempting to create an improved heat bump. Well,
Speaker 1: it's because the typical heat bump was using free on
Speaker 1: as the refrigerant. Now free on is technically called die
Speaker 1: chlora die flora methane, and this stuff has the useful
Speaker 1: trait of having a boiling point that's all the way
Speaker 1: down to minus twenty nine point eight celsius or minus
Speaker 1: twenty one point six four fahrenheit. Now, remember, like water
Speaker 1: has got a boiling point of a hundred degrees celsius
Speaker 1: or two D twelve fahrenheit. That's pretty hot, but free
Speaker 1: on it'll boil off into a gas at negative twenty
Speaker 1: nine point eight celsius. So you see that even in
Speaker 1: cold winters, there's still enough heat in the ambient air
Speaker 1: to boil off the refrigerant in the heat exchanger. Unless
Speaker 1: you're in like a super duper cold environment where you
Speaker 1: would be kind of stuck, the heat pump would not
Speaker 1: be a big help. However, free on has some drawbacks. Now.
Speaker 1: A big drawback is that it contributes to environmental damage.
Speaker 1: It can it is a chemical that, when released into
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, can do massive damage to the ozone layer. Now,
Speaker 1: this was such a concern in the nine nineties that
Speaker 1: countries agreed to ban the manufacturer of free on. First
Speaker 1: developed nations all agreed to stop manufacturing free on in
Speaker 1: the mid nineties, but for developing countries it was considered
Speaker 1: to be kind of I mean, it's it's looked on
Speaker 1: as a complicated situation. Right. You you have a country
Speaker 1: that's on its way toward development telling it, hey, you
Speaker 1: can't benefit from the same stuff that we benefited from
Speaker 1: because it turns out that's harmful. That's a complicated thing.
Speaker 1: So those countries actually had until to stop making free on.
Speaker 1: These days, we still use free on, but only in
Speaker 1: very specific use cases, like as a fire retardant in
Speaker 1: like submarines or aircraft. So Lonnie Johnson wanted to create
Speaker 1: a new kind of heat pump that would just use
Speaker 1: lane old water as a refrigerant instead of free on.
Speaker 1: So there was this growing concern about free on and
Speaker 1: similar chemicals and their environmental impact, but this was before
Speaker 1: countries had decided to ban the stuff, and so really
Speaker 1: Johnson was just trying to think of an alternative that
Speaker 1: would be you know, practical and uh, you know, have
Speaker 1: less of an environmental impact, and water would definitely fit
Speaker 1: the bill if you could make it work. So he's
Speaker 1: kind of thinking this through and creating a system, and
Speaker 1: part of that meant that he machined his own nozzles.
Speaker 1: So he used machining equipment to make nozzles for his
Speaker 1: heat pump design, and one day, while testing out his
Speaker 1: nozzles in his bathroom, he shot a tight stream of
Speaker 1: water clear across the bathroom in a very focused stream,
Speaker 1: and then got into thinking about water guns. Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna talk more about water guns and their design, but
Speaker 1: first let's take another quick break. Okay, we're back. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about your classic water gun. So this is pretty
Speaker 1: super soaker, the little squirt toy versions of water guns,
Speaker 1: the kinds of that you might find in like a
Speaker 1: dollar store or something. Now, your typical water gun has
Speaker 1: a spring loaded trigger, and that trigger activates a lever.
Speaker 1: That lever in turn activates a very small pump inside
Speaker 1: the water gun, and the pumps job is to pump
Speaker 1: water from a reservoir and the gun. Often with the
Speaker 1: squirt guns, the entire interior of the gun acts as
Speaker 1: a reservoir and it pumps the water through a plastic
Speaker 1: tube and out a narrow path at the end of
Speaker 1: the gun's barrel, where a nozzle focuses the escaping water
Speaker 1: into a stream. So let's take that step by step
Speaker 1: to understand exactly what's working from a mechanical perspective. So,
Speaker 1: you've got your plastic tube that extends into the water reservoir.
Speaker 1: If you follow that plastic tube from the reservoir up,
Speaker 1: you'll see that leads to a pump. And the pump
Speaker 1: is a very simple thing it's a cylinder and it's
Speaker 1: a piston, and the piston, when you pull the trigger,
Speaker 1: will move into the cylinder. Now, when the piston moves
Speaker 1: into the cylinder, it forces water or air or whatever
Speaker 1: out of the cylinder, right, It can't be in the
Speaker 1: cylinder of the pistons. There. Also, inside the cylinder is
Speaker 1: a spring, So the piston enters the cylinder, it compresses
Speaker 1: the spring, and when you release the trigger, it allows
Speaker 1: the spring to expand to full size. That forces the
Speaker 1: piston back out of the cylinder again. And when that happens,
Speaker 1: there's a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. So water
Speaker 1: and or air flows back into the cylinder because it's
Speaker 1: been left empty by the pistons movement. Right. So when
Speaker 1: you pair this with a couple of one way valves
Speaker 1: in those tubes, you have yourself an effective pump. So
Speaker 1: one of those valves will allow water to move from
Speaker 1: the reservoir into the cylinder. So when you let go
Speaker 1: of the trigger and the piston is moving out of
Speaker 1: the cylinder, the pump sucks water up from the tube,
Speaker 1: but the water cannot flow back in the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: This is also why you sometimes have to prime the
Speaker 1: old water pistols, you have to pull the trigger a
Speaker 1: few times because you actually have to use that that
Speaker 1: piston to suction water up from a reservoir to go
Speaker 1: into the pump uh in order to have it ready
Speaker 1: to push the water out of the gun. Now, the
Speaker 1: other one way valve leads from the pump to the
Speaker 1: nozzle in the guns barrel. So when you pull the trigger,
Speaker 1: it pushes the piston through the cylinder, forces water out
Speaker 1: of the pump, and the only place the water can
Speaker 1: go is through this tube, through that one way valve
Speaker 1: and out through the nozzle because the other one way
Speaker 1: valve blocks the water from going back into the reservoir. Now,
Speaker 1: because there is a one way valve right there heading
Speaker 1: to the barrel of the gun, that means when you
Speaker 1: let go of the trigger and you have the suction
Speaker 1: ng action happening again, when the piston is moving out
Speaker 1: of the cylinder, that one way valve seals shut, so
Speaker 1: air cannot come back in through the gun barrel. The
Speaker 1: only place where the section can pull anything through is
Speaker 1: through the reservoir. Because that one way valve allows water
Speaker 1: to go from the reservoir back into the pump. You
Speaker 1: have to have those one way valves or else if
Speaker 1: you were to lego of the trigger and it could
Speaker 1: just pull air from the barrel, then you wouldn't suction
Speaker 1: air up how the reservoir anymore. You can have a
Speaker 1: full water gun and keep pulling that trigger and nothing
Speaker 1: happens because all it's doing is pushing air in and
Speaker 1: out through the barrel of the gun. You have to
Speaker 1: have that valve there to help seal the system properly.
Speaker 1: Now that's your basic squirt gun. Johnson figured he could
Speaker 1: do a bit better now. His help made nozzle was
Speaker 1: just one part of his new invention, of course, and
Speaker 1: Johnson wouldn't work on this all on his own. He
Speaker 1: would kind of work with another inventor named Bruce Dandrade
Speaker 1: to kind of get a better squirt gun design. And
Speaker 1: a big part of it was something that heat pumps
Speaker 1: deal with all the time, which is pressurizing a fluid. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously a toy water gun is not going to create
Speaker 1: the same levels of pressurization as an industrial compressor in
Speaker 1: a heat exchange system. That would be bonkers. But a
Speaker 1: pressurization chamber would provide the oomph to force water out
Speaker 1: at a high velocity through the nozzle, which means you
Speaker 1: could shoot streams of water much further than your standard
Speaker 1: little squirt gun. So the idea was you'd use a
Speaker 1: hand pump on the gun to pump air into this
Speaker 1: pressurization chamber, at least originally. Later models of supersoakers would
Speaker 1: actually use water and air rather than just air to
Speaker 1: build up pressure. Valves would prevent the air from escaping
Speaker 1: back out, so you would pump air in, but the
Speaker 1: air could not escape out, and you just keep pumping
Speaker 1: and pumping until you had essentially reached capacity of the canistry.
Speaker 1: You you could not physically move the pump any further.
Speaker 1: Later on, you would even have fail safe so that
Speaker 1: it wouldn't allow you to pump anymore once it reached
Speaker 1: a certain amount of pressure, and that way would be
Speaker 1: less likely to break your new toy. When you pulled
Speaker 1: the trigger, you would essentially open up an escape valve
Speaker 1: for all that pressurized air that was inside this canister,
Speaker 1: and the air having a path of release, would immediately
Speaker 1: follow it, and there's only one path available because of
Speaker 1: those valves. It would only be able to go in
Speaker 1: one direction, and this escaping air would end up pushing
Speaker 1: water out of a secondary reservoir in the gun through
Speaker 1: the nozzle at the end, shooting a stream at an
Speaker 1: impressive distance. Now, it's a little more complicated than I
Speaker 1: just described. So, like I said, there are two water reservoirs.
Speaker 1: The first reservoir, the primary one, is the one you
Speaker 1: would actually fill up when you would get ready to
Speaker 1: do battle. You would open up a little uh tab
Speaker 1: in the gun. You would fill it up with water
Speaker 1: and you close the tab in there. That was the
Speaker 1: primary water reservoir. The second water reservoir would fill up
Speaker 1: as you were pumping pressurized air into the compression and chamber,
Speaker 1: and it was the water in this secondary reservoir that
Speaker 1: would actually shoot out the nozzle when you pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1: So when the pressurized air was released, it was pushing
Speaker 1: water out through this secondary reservoir, not the primary one.
Speaker 1: And again you would use one way valves to control
Speaker 1: fluid flow. That guaranteed that fluids would only be able
Speaker 1: to go in one direction throughout this system. Because if
Speaker 1: you don't have that, then you just really have a
Speaker 1: water gun where water is slashing through tubes but not
Speaker 1: really going anywhere. Now, Johnson initially looked to self fund
Speaker 1: production of his invention, and he gave his daughter a
Speaker 1: prototype of this kind of using like a two leader
Speaker 1: empty soda bottle to act as the compression chamber. And
Speaker 1: then he watched as his seven year old daughter was
Speaker 1: absolutely wrecking shot on that Air Force base. She was
Speaker 1: just dominant in any water gun fights. However, he discovered
Speaker 1: that manufacturing is a complicated and expensive process. I mean,
Speaker 1: it costs a lot of money to first establish a
Speaker 1: production sequence, right if you're building something new, then you
Speaker 1: have to go through and tool that sequence precisely to
Speaker 1: whatever it is you're building, and that's very expensive. So
Speaker 1: Johnson didn't have like two thousand bucks just lying around
Speaker 1: to fund an initial batch of a thousand super soakers.
Speaker 1: So instead he started to look around to see if
Speaker 1: he could find a toy company that he could partner with.
Speaker 1: But that took a long time. And you have to
Speaker 1: keep in mind that while he's doing this, he's also
Speaker 1: kind of working on stuff like stealth bombers, and so
Speaker 1: it's not like he had copious amounts of free time
Speaker 1: on his hands to pursue his dream of making a
Speaker 1: really cool squirt gun. So his search took seven years.
Speaker 1: He happened to encounter a toy company while he was
Speaker 1: at the American International Toy Fair in New York. He
Speaker 1: was there with you know, his his pitch, and he
Speaker 1: got some interest from a Philadelphia based company called Laramie.
Speaker 1: Now that company didn't exactly have the best image in
Speaker 1: the toy world. It was mostly known for making knockoffs
Speaker 1: of popular toy brands. But Laramie was showing an interest
Speaker 1: and that was enough for Johnson because he was not
Speaker 1: really finding any bites at this point. So he was
Speaker 1: invited to travel to Philadelphia and to give a demonstration
Speaker 1: of his prototype, which again used like an empty two
Speaker 1: leader soda bottle as the compression chamber. So you know,
Speaker 1: it was this Jankee collection of plastic and tubes and
Speaker 1: this soda bottle. It didn't necessarily look really polished itself,
Speaker 1: and the Laramie folks were saying, well, does it work?
Speaker 1: And then he shot water clear across the conference room
Speaker 1: and he immediately won the admiration of the Laramie executives
Speaker 1: and they struck a deal with Johnson. They licensed the
Speaker 1: design of his invention, and so that was that. That
Speaker 1: was where Johnson ended up getting the this lucrative licensing
Speaker 1: deal for his his invention, which by the way, he
Speaker 1: had already patented. Laramie would produce the first model of
Speaker 1: this which it wasn't called the super Soaker when it
Speaker 1: first came out. This was around so this model was
Speaker 1: called Deep Power Drencher, and I think that's just as
Speaker 1: awesome a name is super Soaker. It's not alliterative. So
Speaker 1: that's an issue that Power Drencher does sound like, it's
Speaker 1: like it's a force to be reckoned with. But the
Speaker 1: next year was when the company would rebrand the toy
Speaker 1: as the super Soaker, and that name stuck, and it
Speaker 1: also became insanely popular. Like you occasionally see these trends
Speaker 1: and toys where a toy will just be like the
Speaker 1: must have toy of the season. That was what the
Speaker 1: super Soaker was. When it really debuted under that name,
Speaker 1: it was they were flying off store shelves. People were
Speaker 1: crazy about them, including me, and I did have an
Speaker 1: original super Soaker, uh, not the Power Drencher, but when
Speaker 1: it was rebranded. I did have one of those when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, and I love that thing now.
Speaker 1: In an interview with the Henry Ford Innovation Nation, Johnson
Speaker 1: said that it took some engineering to bring all the
Speaker 1: elements together to make this work. Uh. But when you
Speaker 1: compare it to rocket science, it's relatively simple, which you know,
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I love that perspective. Hasbro would subsequently
Speaker 1: acquire Laramie, so the super Soaker brand would move over
Speaker 1: to Hasbro. Johnson would head on back to NASA. Uh.
Speaker 1: He you know, I'd worked at the Air Force. He
Speaker 1: had made a killing by licensing this invention to Laramie,
Speaker 1: and then wanted to continue his his engineering work with NASA.
Speaker 1: And then after that he worked a little bit with
Speaker 1: Hasbro to bring new innovations and improvements to its line
Speaker 1: of NERF guns. In fact, Hasbro would group super Soaker
Speaker 1: under the NERF brand, so you find Nerve Supersoakers these days. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and it's that's kind of funny too, because actually,
Speaker 1: when Johnson was a kid, I didn't mention this earlier.
Speaker 1: That he created a kind of proto NERF gun back
Speaker 1: in his childhood. Used uh, some bamboo to act as
Speaker 1: kind of like a barrel of a gun, and he
Speaker 1: used China berries as ammunition, these little soft berry things
Speaker 1: that grow all over the place here in the Southeast
Speaker 1: and use pressurized air to shoot them, so it was
Speaker 1: kind of like kind of like a NERF gun, just
Speaker 1: it was shooting china berries instead a little foam darts.
Speaker 1: And Johnson created his own design laboratory right here in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: Georgia called Johnson R and D. And they're at the lab.
Speaker 1: Johnson and his team are researching all sorts of fields,
Speaker 1: including environmental technology for alternative power generation solutions, which is
Speaker 1: pretty darn awesome, as well as for the super socer.
Speaker 1: It would continue to evolve under hasbro uh Dandrade would
Speaker 1: incorporate a type of bladder in future supersocer water guns,
Speaker 1: and the bladder would serve both as kind of a
Speaker 1: pressure chamber and a water reservoir. When you would pump
Speaker 1: the supersocer that had these bladders in them, it would
Speaker 1: force water and air into this bladder, thus expanding the bladder.
Speaker 1: But the bladder was made of very stiff material and
Speaker 1: it resisted having this stuff pumped into it, So you
Speaker 1: would get this compression, this pressurization, that interior pressure would
Speaker 1: grow and when you pull the trigger, it would allow
Speaker 1: the pressure to escape and you could, you know, have
Speaker 1: longer pressure with these types of supersocer so you could
Speaker 1: fire it a few more times than having to, like,
Speaker 1: you know, pump for five seconds and then fire and
Speaker 1: then pump for five seconds again. These days, they are
Speaker 1: actually a several different Supersocer models, I mean, tons have
Speaker 1: come out since it debuted. In a lot of the
Speaker 1: current Supersoaker models actually use a a simpler pump mechanism.
Speaker 1: Some of them are are just essentially sucking up water
Speaker 1: into a pump and then pushing it out in high volumes.
Speaker 1: So in other words, it's working on a very similar
Speaker 1: principle as those older squirt guns. It's just larger. Your
Speaker 1: pump is bigger inside these types of guns instead of
Speaker 1: being a little bitty thing that's a spring activated trigger mechanism.
Speaker 1: It's typically like a pump handlem mechanism. But it's still
Speaker 1: when you break it down, a simple pump and not
Speaker 1: using a pressurized container like the original Supersocer did. Others
Speaker 1: use motorized pumps, so you have like a battery operated
Speaker 1: pump that fires the water in the reservoir. But all
Speaker 1: of these gut their start thanks to a rocket scientist
Speaker 1: who just want to make a better heat pump. And
Speaker 1: that's it for this episode. I wanted to give Lonnie
Speaker 1: Johnson a shout out. The guy is incredibly inspiring you.
Speaker 1: If you are not familiar with his work, you'd need
Speaker 1: to look him up. Um not just the supersoker stuff.
Speaker 1: He also just comes across incredibly personable in interviews. He
Speaker 1: is humble and inquisitive and curious and very very fun
Speaker 1: to listen to. So I highly recommend you check them
Speaker 1: out if you have not before, and if you would
Speaker 1: like to suggest a topic for me to cover in
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff, there are a couple of
Speaker 1: different ways you can do that. One is to download
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app. It's free to download. Navigate over
Speaker 1: to the tech Stuff portion of that, and there's a
Speaker 1: little microphone icon there where you can leave a thirty
Speaker 1: second voice message up to thirty seconds anyway, doesn't have
Speaker 1: to be a full thirty seconds, and let me know
Speaker 1: what you would like me to cover in the future,
Speaker 1: or you can drop me a line on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
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