Super Soaker inventor has new science breakthrough

Lonnie Johnson has some impressive hard science credentials.

He’s worked for the Strategic Air Command and for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, outfitting missions to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. He holds about 100 patents, many of them in that arcane spot where chemistry, electricity and physics cross into the marketplace. And his latest invention appears to do the impossible: generating electricity with no fuel and no moving parts.

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Jessica McGowan/jmcgowan@ajc.com

Lonnie Johnson, the creator of the Super Soaker, won a ‘Breakthrough Award’ from Popular Mechanics for a new technology called JTEC that generates electricity through heat differentials .

• See photos: New device for generating energy

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Most electricity is generated using heat to power a mechanical device, such as a piston or a turbine. The JTEC uses heat to force ions through a special membrane. "It's a totally new way of generating electricity from heat," Paul Werbos told Popular Mechanics. The JTEC includes two closed hydrogen cells or "stacks" attached to pairs of electrodes. One is a low-temperature stack, the other is high-temperature. Current compresses hydrogen in the low-temperature stack, ionizing the hydrogen and forcing its protons through the membrane to the high-temperature stack, where the hydrogen expands. Current is generated as electrons are freed. The high-temperature end generates more power than the low-temperature end uses — creating an excess that can cool beer or run TVs and washing machines. Hydrogen is neither burned nor added, and emissions are zero.

LONNIE JOHNSON

Born: Oct. 6, 1949, Mobile
Residence: Ansley Park
Family: Wife, Linda Moore, and four children
Education: Tuskegee University, with degrees in mechanical engineering and nuclear engineering
Career: Research engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratories; engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; nuclear safety engineer with U.S. Air Force; officer with the Strategic Air Command; flight test engineer Edward's Air Force Base.
Businesses: Johnson Research and Development, Johnson Electro-Mechanical Systems, Excellatron Solid State LLC

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But he’s still known as Mr. Squirt Gun.

Even among the geniuses who gathered to honor him and his new thermo-electrochemical converter at a “Breakthrough Awards” banquet in Manhattan this month, the Atlanta scientist’s new invention was ignored when his most famous device was revealed.

“What?” they cried. “You invented the Super Soaker?”

Johnson, 59, doesn’t mind if he’s better known for watery mayhem than rocket science. Perhaps that’s because $1 billion worth of Super Soakers have sold since 1990. A billion dollars could buy most of a Galileo mission.

Johnson’s share (he licensed the Soaker’s design to Larami, later bought by Hasbro) won him the financial independence to pursue his own ideas, which is how the Johnson Thermo-electrochemical Converter system — JTEC for short — was born.

Using heat to force ions out of a hydrogen cell, the JTEC “is just a stunning insight,” said Jerry Beilinson, deputy editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, which honors innovators in its current issue and sponsors the Breakthrough Awards. “I kind of thought we were finished; I didn’t think there was a new way.”

Beilinson groups Johnson with other great synthesists of science, including Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He also points out that Johnson, a native of Mobile, flourished in a somewhat hostile environment.

‘A whole new …

technology’

In 1963 his governor stood up for segregation in Alabama, standing in the schoolhouse door. Five years later, Johnson, a high school senior, finished building a remote-controlled robot with a reel-to-reel tape player for a brain and jukebox solenoids controlling its pneumatic limbs. As a representative of Williamson High School, Johnson took his robot (nicknamed Linex) to a science fair at the University of Alabama.

The door wasn’t exactly blocked, but no other black high schools participated in the event. On the strength of Linex, Williamson won. Teachers predicted Johnson would go far.

His robots went even farther. After graduating from Tuskegee University, Johnson joined the Air Force, worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Sandia, worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab on the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Mars Observer project, among others. He also helped design the Cassini robot probe that flew 740 million miles to Saturn.

In 1990, just before the Super Soaker made him wealthy, Johnson moved to Atlanta. In 2000, he began working in earnest on the JTEC. In 2006 that work came to the attention of Paul Werbos at the National Science Foundation, who recommended Johnson to Popular Mechanics.

“This is a whole new family of technology,” said the NSF’s Werbos. “It’s like discovering a new continent. You don’t know what’s there, but you sure want to explore it to find out.”

Johnson’s device can potentially work with even modest temperature differentials — say, between body heat and ambient air — to power implanted medical devices such as pacemakers. If successful, at high heat it would generate Con Edison-scale output. It also would run backward for refrigeration purposes: put in electricity to generate heat loss for, say, wearable air conditioning.

Paired with a parabolic solar array to generate heat, it would create virtually limitless emission-free power.

Johnson, who projects earnings of $10 billion by 2013, claims a potential 60 percent efficiency rating, which doubles the efficiency of the current leader, the Stirling engine.

“It has a darn good chance,” said Werbos, “of being the best thing on Earth.”

‘Always an adventure’

This energy game-changer comes from unlikely quarters: a renovated factory on a formerly bleak stretch of Decatur Street.

With the help of a $3.9 million empowerment-zone loan from the city, Johnson’s company bought, renovated and outfitted three adjacent buildings on the street. In addition to his workshop, he hosts a high school robotics team sponsored by the 100 Black Men of Atlanta and donates office space for the Georgia Alliance for Children, of which he is the chairman.

On a recent weekday, Johnson, impeccable in head-to-toe khaki, conducts a tour of the workshop, moving among shiny stainless steel deposition chambers and glove boxes where scientists can manipulate delicate materials isolated in a pure argon atmosphere.

Here the two dozen employees of his privately owned concern work on several projects at once, developing solid-state batteries and lithium-air batteries.

At one station Bill Rauch is working on solid-state batteries. “He’s full of ideas,” says Rauch, a Ph.D. in material science from Georgia Tech. “It’s always an adventure.”

Rauch says every now and then Johnson has a get-together at his Ansley Park home for the employees; they swim in the pool and squirt each other with off-the-shelf Super Soakers. Then Johnson comes out with a prototype water weapon not available to the public. He crushes the opposition.

Johnson’s interest in thermal engines and heat pumps led to experiments using water vapor instead of Freon as a compressible liquid, which led, oddly enough, to the birth of the Super Soaker.

His work with batteries led to an interest in generating electricity electrochemically, instead of mechanically, which led to the JTEC. The JTEC completes the loop between heat pumps and batteries.

It’s freshman chemistry, said Karl Littau, a material scientist at Palo Alto Research Center, a California nursery for high-tech innovation. “Millions of people learn about that every year, yet he was the guy who put two and two together.”

Most of his ideas are connected, said Johnson.

“Sometimes I think I’m still working on everything I ever invented.”