It was because of the success of the Super Soaker, I was able to at least get an audience with people to present some of my other ideas. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
Large companies can afford to file patents on every idea they have. Small companies, we have to weigh our options, do the research. We have to decide where to place our bets. We can’t just cover everything we do. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
You sometimes have a very innovative company, and if they come up with one idea, they can come up with many more – if they’re successful. If they can’t feed themselves, you lose that creativity. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
More and more, other countries are able to manufacture things cheaper, beating us in the marketplace in a lot of ways. So we need to do whatever we can to make sure America’s ability to protect its ingenuity is as strong as it can be. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
Peer review is fine, as long as you’re making incremental improvements to a technology. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
I decided I could develop a toy and get some revenue from that and then use that revenue to really become an inventor and work on some of the more challenging projects I had in mind. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
I am a nuclear engineer. I’m working on advanced energy technology. I have a new type of the engine that converts heat into electricity, and I’ve also developed a new type of battery that’s all ceramic, without liquid electrolyte. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
When I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in the early ’80s is when I first got the idea. The Super Soaker was based on some engineering principles that I applied. I was actually working on another invention which was a heat pump that would use water as a working fluid instead of Freon. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
Especially when you have a lot of technology you’re developing as a small company, trying to protect that technology is a real problem. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
I got my first patent in 1979 before I left the Air Force. I called it the Digital Distance Measuring Instrument. It used ones and zeros and dots and dashes and a magnifying lens to read binary-encoded information from a scale that was photographically reduced. It used the same kind of technology that’s used in CDs and DVDs. Lonnie Johnson Read Quote
