The NASA Engineer Who Won $72.9 Million From Hasbro

In 1982, Lonnie Johnson was at home in his bathroom, tinkering with a new kind of heat pump. His design used water instead of freon as a cooling fluid. When he connected a nozzle to a faucet and turned on the tap, a powerful stream shot across the room and hit the opposite wall. He looked at it and thought: that would make a great squirt gun.

From the Air Force to NASA to a Toy Store

Johnson grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and built his first robot from scrap metal as a teenager. He earned a master's degree in nuclear engineering, then joined the U.S. Air Force, where he worked on the stealth bomber program. He later moved to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, contributing to the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

But the bathroom experiment stayed with him. By 1989, Johnson had refined the pressurized water gun into a product called the Power Drencher. Larami Corporation licensed it, renamed it the Super Soaker, and put it on shelves in 1990. Within two years it was the best-selling toy in the United States, generating $200 million in sales in 1991 alone.

$1 Billion Sold - and a Shortfall in Royalties

Hasbro eventually acquired Larami, and the Super Soaker line kept growing. Total sales approached $1 billion. Under his licensing agreement, Johnson was entitled to royalties on every unit sold. But in 2013, after reviewing Hasbro's records, Johnson discovered the company had been underpaying him on both Super Soaker and Nerf products from 2007 to 2012.

He filed for arbitration in February 2013. The arbitrator reviewed the full record and ruled entirely in Johnson's favor on every point. In November 2013, Hasbro was ordered to pay $72.9 million in unpaid royalties. His attorney summed it up: "We got everything we asked for."

Still Building

Johnson has never stopped inventing. He holds over 250 patents. His current project - the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter - aims to turn heat directly into electricity with no moving parts. The man who accidentally invented a billion-dollar toy is now working on clean energy technology that could power the future.