Today I learned Lonnie Johnson is responsible for some of my best childhood memories.
The black rocket scientist was working on an idea for a cooling device that ended up pushing out huge amounts of water and air.
“I said to myself, ‘Jeez, this would make a great water gun,” Johnson told the New York Times in 2001.
With that idea Johnson developed the Super Soaker, of which I probably owned a dozen as a child to build an arsenal I used to defeat the neighbor kids with those satisfyingly stinging jets of water.
Oh, so good.
It’s Black History Month and he’s one of “20 Tech Game Changers in Black History” I found out about today from The Root.
There’s also Mark Dean, of IBM, who is watching the decline of PC he helped invent as the tablet rises and Granville T. Woods, called the “black Thomas Edison,” holds 50 patents including railway telegraph technology that helped reduce railway accidents while Garrett Morgan invented the three-position traffic signal after seeing an accident between a carriage and a car.
Be sure to check out the whole list.
Black History Month: People that changed tech history is a post from: OC Unwired
