February 25

Hometown Honors SuperSoaker Inventor

On this day in 1994, the mayor of Marietta, Georgia declared February 25 to be "Lonnie G. Johnson Day" in honor of the city's accomplished African American inventor. Johnson is best known for inventing the SuperSoaker, a high-powered water gun which uses an air pump to pressurize its water supply. Johnson received a patent for the SuperSoaker in 1988, and since then more than 250 million SuperSoakers have been sold. A former NASA engineer, Johnson has also won awards for his work on the Galileo, Jupiter, and Mars Observer space probes, and he has earned over 40 patents for inventions ranging from refrigeration systems to wet-diaper detectors