ALAN PRICE: My name is Alan Price. I'm Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Along with my colleague, Steven Rothstein of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, we, the Library staff and the Foundation staff, welcome you to the JFK Space Fest programming and activities.
We are grateful to the Raytheon Company for its lead sponsorship of today's events and programs, as well as the Boeing Company and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Thanks, also, to our underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsors Bank of America, the Lowell Institute, and Gourmet Catering; and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, Xfinity, and WBUR.
Now, this is the exciting moment, as I could see from some of the fans that have just started to admit how much Dr. Lonnie Johnson changed their childhood and their lives with tremendous formative experiences.
I'm honored to introduce our final speaker today, Dr. Lonnie Johnson, who's president and founder of Johnson Research and Development Company, Incorporated, and its numerous spin-off companies. A former Air Force and NASA engineer, he is also the inventor of the Super Soaker [applause], the most popular water toy in history. Dr. Johnson holds over 100 patents with more than 20 additional pending. I do not think he's going to slow down. He's the author of several publications on spacecraft power systems. And Dr. Johnson has kindly agreed to answer questions following his presentation.
Please help me welcome Dr. Lonnie Johnson. [applause]
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: Thank you so much. I can't think of a– this has got to be the greatest honor. It's right up there at the top, if not the greatest. But speaking at the Kennedy Library, this is dedicated to someone who has had a profound impact on my life. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. I'm going to talk a little bit about my history; I'm going to give you some background. Because I think in this political climate, it's important to do this. We need to place some things into perspective.
I'm going to start out with my childhood. As a small child in the '50s, I played with other kids in the neighborhood; we played out in the street, we played Four Square, kickball and other games. And one of the things that I do remember about those days of innocence is how we as small children playing in the street in front of our house, whenever we saw a police car turn down our street, we would all scatter; we would run and hide. We would hide under the house, we would hide behind trees. We would hide just about anywhere we could find. That was just the way it was. I never thought really why; it was just the way life was.
About 50 years later I met a guy named Doug Blackmon. He was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. And he introduced me to a book that he had written called, Slavery By Another Name. And what I want to start out doing is share some passages from that book that documents a few events in history.
On July 31, 1903, the White House received a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her 14-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted and sold to a plantation. Local police would do nothing, had no interest. "Mr. President," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world, "They won't let me have him. He has done nothing for them to have him in chains so I write you for help." Like the vast majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular envelope at the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number; in this case it was 12007. No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the National Archives.
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham, who was a 22-year-old African American man, was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with vagrancy, an offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she had a job. He was found guilty and sentenced to one year hard labor. He was turned over to US Steel Corporation for $12 a month. And within hours, he was plunged into a mine called Slope No. 12, Pratt Mines, Birmingham, Alabama. He was chained to a wooden barrack at night and forced to dig almost every waking hour, and was subject to the whip if he didn't meet his quota. He along with about 60 other fellow miners died that year under harsh treatment. They along with hundreds of others are dumped in shallow graves in the refuge of the mine.
Judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African American workers to local farmers. They allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms.
Millions of blacks lived in terror. Revenues from neo-slavery poured the equivalent of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina – where 75 percent of the black population lived.
Fast forward to October 13, 1941. Charles Bledsoe pleaded guilty in a federal court in Mobile, Alabama – my hometown – to the charge of peonage for holding a black man named Martin Thompson against his will. Using the same techniques used by others, extending back to 1903, Bledsoe didn't resist the charge and trusted that federal officials would not deal him harshly. And he was correct. His fine was $100 and the status of the new black slavery was firmly entrenched.
Two months later, the imperial forces of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. In August 1942, seven months into the war, American leaders were anxious to mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan and Germany's propaganda machine. Japan was urging that the place of the Negro in the war was with the yellow race. The US was finding it difficult to establish a moral platform from which to criticize Germany for its treatment of Jews. Suddenly cases of lynching and involuntary servitude were being vigorously investigated.
With the dawn of World War II, profound global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans. By the late 1950s, reports of federal investigations of voluntary servitude had reduced to a trickle. However, the social impact had already been entrenched.
Out of a desire to protect loved ones, many parents taught their small, innocent children playing in the streets in the neighborhood to not trust the police, to run and hide and stay clear of the police.
Actually, those tactics paid off for me one evening when I was riding my new bicycle that I'd gotten for Christmas on my way from my parents' house to my grandmother's house and I was really excited about this bicycle. And when a car turned down the street behind me, I started pretending – suppose that car was chasing me. My bicycle is so fast, it could never catch me. And I started pedaling real fast. But when I turned again, they turned behind me again. I turned a third time; again. I realized that it was not a pretend situation, they were actually after me.
As they got closer, I realized I wasn't going to make it to the next intersection. I rode off of the street and started turning around to head back to my parents' house. They went down to the corner, turned around and started coming back after me. Now I'm desperate to get home.
I got within about a half a block of home and I realized I wasn't going to make it. So I ended up turning off the street again, and this time I abandoned my bike and ran up a hill. And if any of you have been in the South and felt some of the thorns and stickers that will get you in a weed field, you'll imagine what it was like. My legs were burning, but I was hiding deep in these bushes.
And they stopped and got out of the car. There were four men, four white men. And they were pointing up the hill, saying, "He went up that way." And they were looking to see if they could spot me. In reality, I was not too far away from them; I was right in the bushes, just a few feet away. But they couldn't see me.
In any case, I got away and managed to survive that event.
After Americans returned World War II, fighting men, unwilling to capitulate to the docile state of helplessness that preceded the war, many joined the agitation that eventually became the civil rights movement. In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King assumed leadership of the Southern Leadership Conference, and in 1958, he met with President Eisenhower in the White House.
In the '60s, the civil rights movement had gained momentum and it was in full swing. This was my time. I was a small child and I loved to tinker. I was always curious about things. I had a strong interest in math and science. I was 12 years old in 1962 when President Kennedy announced his vision of sending man to the moon and return him safely to Earth.
I was intrigued and I watched and hung on every word. His statements had a profound impact on my view of the world because he was talking about the power of vision, in my mind, the idea of taking on a really, really tough problem driven by vision, an idea, taking on a problem where we don't know how to solve this yet, we don't have the materials, we don't have the know-how. This is a mission that's never been done before. But the idea of saying that we were going to do it anyway and do it because it was hard, not because it was easy. I was thinking to myself – I was 12 years old, this is 1962 – geez, before the decade was out, geez, I'm going to be really old by then, I'll probably be about 20 years old. [laughter]
In any case, I was very excited. I went to the library, I read about rockets. I taught myself how to mix rocket fuel. And in fact, I was mixing rocket fuel in my mother's kitchen one day and it caught fire. And I almost burned the house down. I knew I was in trouble when I saw– it was solid propellant. So once it starts burning you can't put it out. And I had a whole pot of it on the stove. [laughter]
In the '60s, there was a race to the moon, but the Vietnam War was going on as well and the civil rights movement was going on, and it was all in full swing. When I think about that era, I can't help but wonder how many people really understand the significance of Dr. King's activity and his work.
Black people were rioting and marching. There were cities on fire. There was mass looting. The military was in Vietnam and the National Guards were in the streets here at home in the United States.
Governor Wallace had stood in the door in 1963 at the University of Alabama to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood from registering in that school. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and sent 100 Guardsmen to the University to escort these two students in to register.
That year, November 22, 1963, President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
In 1964, Martin Luther King won the Nobel Prize.
In 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy, the brother of President Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic primary for President.
Within many black communities, black militants were being hailed as heroes. And many were expounding revolution. Both white and black people were very much afraid, and some were actually being killed.
In more recent times, whenever I hear about suicide bombing or some other catastrophic event, I can't help but wonder, like in the Middle East, if America could have been in a longtime conflict or massive war if it had not been for Martin Luther King.
Martin encouraged and actively sought harmony and fair treatment. He encouraged African Americans to hold their heads high and walk with dignity. And at the same time, provided white Americans an opportunity to see themselves and their actions with clarity.
April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. That was the year I graduated high school. But by this time, Martin's dream had taken hold and America was forever changed. That same year, my science project, Linex the Robot, won first place at the University of Alabama, the same school that governor Wallace had said "no black students would ever attend." Won first place at the Junior Engineering Technical Society's exposition and conference. This was a regional conference, which meant that kids were there from all over the Southeastern states.
I was inspired to do this because I watched these other robots on TV; nobody had told me that those other robots had people inside them. [laughter] But what was important, a lesson I was learning, but not realizing I was learning, but it was the same lesson that President Kennedy was teaching – taking on a challenge, doing something that is based on vision and solving all the problems that it takes to get there leads to very, very useful results.
This robot, what looks like eyes was a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Digital technology didn't exist back then. That was my way of programming him. He had arms that could move anywhere human arms could move.
Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon July 21, 1969. President Kennedy's vision for space exploration had been achieved. The great visions of the '60s spawned a new period of social enlightenment. The technological advances and even the thrust and interest in technology that we enjoy today has its roots in President Kennedy's initiative. Most important is our attitude toward aggressively pushing technology to higher and higher levels driven by vision.
Dr. King's vision of social enlightenment, at least until now, resulted in interracial tolerance and cooperation and compassion at levels that are unprecedented in American history. Just a few years ago, we had our first African American President, something that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.
President Kennedy inspired me to become a nuclear engineer. After graduating, I worked on some of the nation's most advanced technology programs of their time. While on active duty in the Air Force, I worked on the Stealth Bomber program; in fact, I was the first flight test engineer assigned to that project representing the Strategic Air Command, which was the command that was receiving that aircraft. I did orbit insertion analysis for the Voyager program, the space launch.
And in fact, as a result of some of the analysis that I did, which demonstrated some things that NASA had said that were wrong– they had claimed that once the upper stage of the spacecraft, of the launch vehicle, the Titan, had burned and placed the Centaur in orbit, that that system could not reenter the earth. And the concern was that this was a nuclear-powered spacecraft. It had these radioisotope materials on board. Well, I did some analysis that showed that there were some burn orientations whereby that spacecraft could come back in.
As a result, I was offered a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I went there as the power systems engineer on the Galileo project. I was responsible for integrating the power system onto the spacecraft, all of the interfaces of design. And also doing mission phase analysis to make sure there was enough power to do all of the various tasks that the spacecraft would have to do. Orbit insertion burns, the various science missions, acquisition, data acquisition, and so forth; all of those things I would actually simulate to make sure that if we turn those particular instruments on and considering all the power that the spacecraft needed for attitude control, and so forth, that they could successfully be accomplished.
I actually ran into a problem whereby if there was a fault on the spacecraft, a short circuit or something like that, electrically going wrong, that the spacecraft memories could be wiped out because they were volatile memories; meaning that if they lost power, the memories would go blank and the spacecraft would be a neat spacecraft with a computer and everything, but there would be no program or instructions telling it what to do.
So I came up with what was called a memory keep-alive power supply. And when I first introduced it, I knew it was kind of far out from what they had been thinking up until that point, so I told the chief systems engineer, When you tell the team about this idea, they're probably going to say it won't work. And when they say that, let me know; I'll go home and build one in my garage and I'll bring it in and demonstrate it.
Well, they weren't about to allow that to happen [laughter], so they started working on it. And lo and behold, we got it working, got it on the spacecraft, and we were able to have a memory power system that would not die, even if there was a massive short circuit on the spacecraft.
Afterwards, I had a fellow engineer in particular came up to me and said, "Lonnie, I want to apologize for the things that I was saying about your idea behind your back." [laughter] And I said, "What did you say?" "Oh, never mind." [laughter] So to this day, I have no idea what he said.
In any case, I had a very successful professional career. And of course, my most famous invention, the Super Soaker water gun that you are all aware of. [applause] Most people don't realize that aside from the Super Soaker, the Nerf dart gun line, in fact the N-Strike Nerf dart gun line is based largely on my patents as well. In fact, I may have made more money on Nerf than I did the Super Soaker.
But I wanted to become the king of all toy guns and, again, setting a goal, having this vision and working toward it and achieving it, nothing works like perseverance, that goal was achieved as well.
Most people want to know, How did you come up with the idea of the Super Soaker? So I'll pause a minute to explain that. I would go home in the evenings. I was at JPL working on Galileo at the time. But when I would go home in the evening, I would work on my own projects and my own ideas. And one of the things I was working on was a new type of heat pump because at the time there was a great bit of concern about Freon and the impact that Freon was having on the environment. And Freon's used in air conditioning.
And so, I thought, well, what could be better for the environment than water? So I wanted to come up with an air conditioning system that would use water as a working fluid instead of Freon. That would be an ideal solution.
So I machined these nozzles and I was going to use what was called a jet pump with the Bernoulli effect – this is from engineer terms – to pump the water vapor, because water vapor has a very large volume at low temperature. So I had experimented with these nozzles that I made and I had hooked them to the bathroom sink. And as I was trying to create this low pressure to pump the water vapor, I turned and shot the stream of water across the bathroom, and I said, Geez, this is kind of neat. [laughter]
So I decided to put my hard science project– because I was having problems getting people to invest in some of the ideas I had. I knew they were all great [laughter], but a lot of times people didn't get it. So I thought, well, why don't I invent a toy and that way I could earn enough money to support my habit. [laughter] So that's what I decided to do.
I figured I'd make enough money that I could live on and that way I could be free to tinker and come up with some other inventions. I had no idea. [audio out] –best-selling toy in the world. And between that and the Nerf dart gun, it has had a profound impact on my life, obviously.
So now I am a full-time inventor. And I kind of relate to these guys [regarding the cartoon on screen] who are standing around asking, "Are you going to sit around inventing all day or are you going to come hunting?" They have no idea, if he's successful, what impact that machine gun will have and how it will compare to the performance of their spears. So I actually relate to this cartoon.
But I'm sure you've all seen an image or a picture like this that shows human history, how we've evolved. This goes back about three-and-a-half million years. But at about two-and-a-half billion years, we picked up our first tool, which was a rock. And we've progressed since then, the spear, and fire, and so forth.
Fast forward to about 500 years ago, this is where we were. This is Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria. Sticks and fabric. But they were sophisticated for its day. In fact, it took the Queen of Spain to commission this voyage. It took a nation state to make that voyage possible. But the ship only traveled about two-and-a-half miles an hour.
Then about 500 years later, we had the Saturn 5 rocket. Instead of traveling at two-and-a-half miles an hour, it put astronauts into a trajectory going to the moon at about 25,000 miles an hour. A lot faster. Instead of being about 58 feet long, the Saturn 5 rocket was 300 feet tall. A very, very dramatic transition in technology over 500 years.
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone about 120 years ago. Now we have satellites, a communication capability that is unprecedented, obviously. We have the cell phone; we can reach in our pocket and literally communicate just about instantaneously with anyone in the world.
The same human hand, the first tool was a rock; the second tool, or the tool today, rather, is the cell phone. But what's dramatic for me in looking at this is that there's a lot more in common than just a human hand. The rock and cell phone are basically made out of the same materials – minerals from the earth; principally, silicon and silicon oxide. The difference and the more profound thing that they have in common is a human brain, our ability to envision things and to make those things we envision a reality.
Masayoshi Son, the president of SoftBank, predicts that in about 30 years, artificial intelligence will have an IQ of about 10,000. Let's place that into perspective. The average human being has an IQ of about 100; Einstein was 200. In 30 years, computers will be 10,000. They're already debating us, if you've seen IBM's Debater, putting together logical sentences, making a case to counter a case that a human is arguing.
Where is this technology going to lead us? As we develop more and more capability, we already understand how to reengineer ourselves genetically and we have our lawmakers struggling with the idea, well, where do we limit that? We don't want to start changing our genetic code. But we have the capability.
When I see people walking around with body pierces and tattoos and things like that, and of course their cell phone's in their ear or watching their cell phones, I think to myself, Eventually, we're going to go online. We already rely on our computers – they're more accurate than we are; that's why we use calculators. They have great memories; that's why we use databases and we research things on the Internet because we want to draw that information so it remembers better than we do. It's just a matter of time.
[audio out]
I'm now developing a new type of engine and trying to contribute to this legacy, if you will, of human endeavor and invention. This is what I do; I come up with a new type of engine that converts heat into electricity. It was designated by Popular Mechanics magazine as one of the top ten world-changing inventions. It seems like no matter what I do, and what ideas I come up with, I'll never outdo the Super Soaker. [laughter] But it will eventually make the steam engine obsolete. This is a new engine that will be more efficient than other engines because it operates on a more efficient thermodynamic cycle.
What's really neat about it, to me, is that it has no moving mechanical parts. It's all solid state, but yet it works on basic engine principles of compressing a gas at low temperature, heating it up and expanding it high temperature. All engines work that way. Steam engines, you pump water to high pressure, send it into a boiler, heat it up, turn it into steam, expand it at high temperature through a turbine. Your car engine pulls air in at low temperature, compresses it at low temperature in the cylinder. You inject fuel to heat it up and it expands at high temperature and you get a lot more work out of the high temperature expansion. All engines work on that basic principle.
Mine does the same thing. It compresses working fluid at low temperature. Heats it up and expands at high temperature. Except there are no moving mechanical parts and the heat energy gets converted directly into electricity.
I'm also working on a new battery technology called lithium air batteries. We've been working on this technology literally for about 15 years. I stopped working on it for a while because the problems just seemed so difficult. But I refocused on it again because I figured out a way to sidestep those issues. But imagine, a Tesla, instead of going about 200 or 300 miles, imagine it going 2000 or 3000 miles on a single charge. It's a game changer.
I just proposed this to NASA earlier this week at a conference, where we talked about how it would survive the 14-day lunar nights. You need enough energy, storage capacity to survive on the moon because the moon's nighttime is 14 days and you can't rely on solar energy. So this is a concept for collecting solar energy using my technology, my engine, my heat-to-electric converter, to convert that solar energy into electricity and then store that electricity in my super battery, the lithium oxygen battery that I was just describing.
We also have an ongoing contract with NASA to develop my heat-to-electric converter to power future nuclear spacecraft that will go to other planets. In fact, the Interstellar Mission is the primary focus of that particular project.
So in closing, what I'd like to say, and the thought I'd like to leave you with is that basically I've done very well with the Super Soaker, but I literally invested everything I have into the projects that I'm working on now. I'm totally committed. And my one hope is that the achievements and the accomplishments and contributions that I made will be worthy of the many sacrifices of so many people over the years, in the course of history, who made it possible for me to do what I do now.
Thank you. [applause]
Thank you so much.
ALAN PRICE: We have microphones for people who'd like to ask questions. If you could just walk to the microphones.
Q: I'm excited about your non-moving electricity generators. How are they different than conventional thermoelectrics which are less exciting?
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: In fact, the whole idea that NASA has is to replace existing thermoelectrics with my device. Existing thermoelectrics, they're semiconductors and if it were not for the fact that they're very thin and all solid, they would do pretty good. But the problem is that if you have heat on one side and you're trying to turn that heat into electricity, most of the heat gets conducted through to the other side without being converted.
My engine, the heat source portion is located near the heat source, and the low temperature side is located in a different location. They can be separated apart. And the working fluid or the hydrogen inside circulates between the two.
So you electrochemically compress hydrogen at the low temperature side. It flows over to the high temperature side and expands from high pressure to low pressure. That happens at high voltage. The compression happens at low voltage. You don't have this parasitic heat loss.
Q: It's more like a conventional cycle rather than the–
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: Yes, it is an engine cycle. It is an engine.
Q: This is so cool, thank you.
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: Thank you.
Q: So what was it like being a flight test engineer for that bomber?
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: That was intriguing. The question is, what was it like being a flight test engineer? We were early on so we– I mentioned that I was the first engineer assigned from the User Command which was Strategic Air Command. But that airplane was fascinating because it reminded me– I was obviously a Star Trek fan growing up, right. [laughter] So on this airplane, everything was electronic. And you could literally pull up ship systems. And I'm like, wait a minute, that's what Scotty used to do! [laughter] He'd pull it up on the screen and he'll tell you where the fault is, what the problem is, and what subsystem replacement, and so forth. This is really cool. It had an atomic clock so it'd have super accuracy. The technology was really, really advanced. I was intrigued by it.
The other thing that was interesting, I was working on it at a time when it was still highly classified. And so, the military was not even acknowledging that it existed. The thing that was really fascinating to me was that we would go to the plant were people were working on it. A lot of people there working on this airplane had no idea what they were working on. They were working on something; they didn't know what it was; they were building parts. It was really cool.
Q: Hi. I currently work at a makerspace. I'm trying to learn more about robotics. And don't see too many people who look like me there. And I'm wondering about your legacy and if you could consider having some scholarships for girls who look like me who are interested in robotics and other types of technology that you have been involved with over the years.
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: I think I understood most of your question. You're saying that you're interested in robotics. You don't see many people who look like you in that space.
Q: Um hmm.
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: And you were asking about scholarships.
Q: Yeah, I'm asking about your legacy in scholarships, part of your legacy.
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: Okay, thank you. I am very much involved in a robotics program. In fact, some of you – I suspect most of you – may be aware of the FIRST Robotics program. Dean Kamen started that program. It's a major, major, at this point even an international robotics program. I'm on the board of directors for that program. It's about 500,000 kids involved in it. But my mission and my focus is on kids who are in the inner city who would otherwise not participate or leave themselves out. And I think that program would work for them.
So we managed to set up teams at my facility. I have about eight teams that I sponsor and provide space for. When I set this team up, I partner with the 100 Black Men of Atlanta and I charge them and that team. I said, We're going to build robotics and we're going to compete, but most important, we're going to go into the inner city, we're going to reach out to kids who are in a poverty state who would otherwise not participate in this. We're going to get these kids interested in robotics and technology and let them see what they can do. Having kids who look like them do this? As a result, Georgia literally is leading the country in the number of African American students involved in FIRST Robotics. [applause]
I also tease Dean Kamen who founded this program, I tell him, "I started high school robotics back 50 years ago." [laughter] But it's a very successful program. But more important, there's about $70 million in scholarships available to students who participate in this program. And so, by just participating in it, you're in a select group that can apply for scholarships that are provided by large corporations across the country, as well as the major universities, because they understand the importance of the program.
So that's one of the things that I'm doing. [applause]
Q: I was going to ask about the lithium air batteries. I'm curious how you came up with that idea and how they work.
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: The lithium air battery. Another description or name for it could be lithium fuel cells. And the way a fuel cell works is you have a fuel– let me go back a minute. I think I have some time, so let me do a little tutorial on how batteries work.
Think about a match. You strike a match and it starts burning. That reaction wants to happen. It's at temperature the reaction gets going. The energy you're getting out is heat. The fuel is the match and the wood; it wants to react with oxygen.
Inside of a battery, the same thing is going on. You've got a fuel that wants to react with an oxide. But in order to react with that oxide, it's got to give up an electron to get through what's called the electrolytic separator because only an ion can go through there. So if this atom releases an electron, then its ion can go through to the other side. The electron goes through the external circuit and gets to the other side. Then it can react with oxygen, which is something it wants to do. So that reaction wants to happen. You put the electrolyte separator in there to control that reaction so that you get an electrical current out instead of heat.
The lithium air battery, so you've got a fuel, lithium, that wants to react with oxygen. Well, there's plenty of oxygen in the air. It also wants to react with moisture. So you can't just have expose it to oxygen or air and have it– the only thing it'll do is start reacting. It'll turn black, and, if there's enough moisture, it'll even burst into flames. So you don't want that to happen.
So we started working on a solid state battery that uses a glass electrolyte. It literally is a solid material, glass, that will conduct ions through. So I reasoned, well, I can have a glass here that protects the lithium that oxygen can't get through. I can conduct the lithium ions through to the other side with react with oxygen in the air. And that way I don't have to have all this heavy oxide material in the battery that makes it heavy and makes the energy per unit volume low. I can just use oxygen from outside the battery.
The lithium/oxygen reaction is right up there with gasoline. It's about 11,000 watt-hours per kilogram. Gasoline is about 13,000 watt-hours per kilogram. So there's a lot of energy. But when you put a battery together and you've got all this other stuff in there, it's only about 200 watt-hours per kilogram. So the goal is to unlock more of that potential by using this glass and conducting the ions through.
So I stopped working on it because, on the other side, in the oxygen side where the air is, you had to have electric electrolyte because you've got to conduct the lithium ions, you've got to conduct the oxygen ions, you've got to have a reaction product, and all this stuff, and a liquid to do that.
Well, we couldn't find a stable electrolyte that would work beyond the glass. The glass was okay, but the liquid in the cathode was a problem. And even the Department of Energy worked on that for a while and couldn't come up with a solution. Well, now I have a way around all of that.
So I think the bottom line, it's kind of getting back to President Kennedy's goal. Even one of the statements that was made earlier by the first astronaut that was speaking this morning – failure's not an option, I think he said. In this particular case, no, it doesn't mean exactly that. It means giving up is not an option. Quitting is not an option. Perseverance is the one path to success that you can count on. Even when I think about inventing sometimes – and this is a good example because I was working on this idea– I'd stopped working on it, but obviously somewhere in my subconscious I was still thinking about it and I came up with this idea, and now I'm working on it again. And I think I have a path that's going to lead to success.
Q: I guess I'd love to know who encouraged you? Who taught you that you could go for a goal? Who taught you "yes, I can"?
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: That's a fair question. This kind of gets at the heart of perseverance. And when people sometimes ask me about, in particular teachers, and they ask me for advice, I tell them that kids are like snowballs rolling down a hill. The further they roll down the hill, they gather more snow and they get bigger. What you have to be careful with is what hill they're rolling down. I've had many people give me feedback over my life. And a lot of that feedback obviously has been positive. I've had some negative feedback, but by and large it's positive. Success begets success.
But my point is that if you're rolling down a hill, a child, and getting negative feedback – you're a troublemaker, why are you always getting in trouble, what's your problem, something's wrong with you – you keep saying that enough, the child's going to own it. That's how they're going to see themselves. They're going to say, "I'm a troublemaker." And pride steps in and, "I'm going to be the best troublemaker I can." [laughter] You know?
On the other hand, if you're rolling down a positive hill and you're getting positive feedback, you start feeling successful – How did you do that? Boy, that's a great accomplishment. Wow, you're very creative. After a while you start thinking of yourself that way. And you want more success. And you're willing to take even more risk to get that positive feedback. It's almost like it's addictive. And that's what you want.
So you want to give positive feedback and be very, very careful when you give negative feedback, and how you give it.
Q: Hi, Dr. Johnson. I wanted to ask you a quick question around the protection of intellectual property. You talked a bit of it today about the process you went through in developing and designing the Super Soaker. And obviously, you were brilliant enough to design that, but you were also smart enough to protect that intellectual property. So you were involved in a very well-publicized lawsuit that you won around protecting those royalties for the Super Soaker. And we live in an era now where young designers are so quick to publish the work that they're doing on social media and on the Internet without thinking about protecting that intellectual property. Can you talk a little bit about the importance in protecting your work so that it's not stolen from you?
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: Absolutely. In the US, you have an advantage in that you can put something in the public domain and you have a year to file it. As soon as it's exposed in public at all, US or otherwise, you cannot file in foreign countries. So you have to be very careful putting stuff out.
Contractually, it's a very complicated space, and I don't even know where to begin, quite honestly. But protecting your intellectual property, obviously, is extremely important. When I presented the Super Soaker to Larami, I did have patent protection already, and I had patents pending already. That was very important because I don't think, in hindsight, as I got to know Myung Son, the president of Larami, if I didn't have the patent, I suspect that he would have just gone on and produced it. And in fact, I've had other companies that I've talked to about inventions and things that I had submitted while patents were pending and they were all excited, and then later on they start working on it and I called them up and they'll say, "What is he calling about?" like they don't even know why I'm calling them or who I am, and this kind of thing. So it happens.
I'll tell you a story about the Super Soaker and the dart guns to kind of place that into perspective. In the end, it became the [audio out] licensed contract for patents, basically, and the invention itself and using my technology. And I wrote the contract kind of broad, saying I knew this technology, the water gun was going to evolve and take different shapes and was going to look different. And even a lot of improvements were going to happen. So I wrote the contract in a way that says, You can work on improvements, I can work on improvements; we're doing this together. And anything we come up with that is based on this basic concept is going to be covered by the contract. And that worked real well.
There were other things and other issues that happened. After a while, Larami started putting other products– when Super Soaker brand became very successful, they said, Oh, we can use this brand to sell other products that aren't based on Johnson's patent. So they started putting extra water bottles and extra other things on the product line and they were making money. But these things were not covered by my patent. And I saw that and I was taken aback by it, and obviously disappointed that that was happening.
So when I came up with the Nerf line – and this was more of a challenge because at the time, Nerf was already out. Hasbro was making Nerf dart guns. But I wanted to be the king of all toy guns [laughter], so I started working on Nerf dart guns. And I made little ones, big ones. And they all worked better than what Hasbro had.
The star of the show was this fully automatic machine Nerf dart gun called a WildFire. And when I presented that to Hasbro, they were like, wow. They were very impressed to the point where they were somewhat intimidated, I think. They didn't want me to take that product line to one of their competitors who could have started to take market share away from them. And so, they did the deal with me because they wanted to control that industry.
But I did something different. I told them, I said, These guns work better than what you have, and I'd like to have my own subcategory under Nerf. You can call it what you want to – they ended up calling it N-Strike – but anything you sell under that subcategory name you've got to pay royalties on. And sure enough, the gun started selling, they were doing real well, N-Strike became very popular. And they started putting other products under that line, and they weren't paying royalties. And I was thinking that, well– in fact, the royalties started to dwindle down and I was thinking, well, kids were excited about the Nerf guns for a while and now they're not so excited and they're not selling well, and so forth.
Then one day I went to the toy store and I saw all these Nerf guns, and I saw all these things. And there were all these things under the N-Strike. So I went and called them up and they said, "Well, Mr. Johnson, you're misinterpreting the contract." I said, "No, but I negotiated this intentionally. We've had this discussion." Well, needless to say, after a long, extended discussion about this, we did not come to a meeting of the minds and I ended up filing a lawsuit. Which I won [applause] to the tune of about $70 million. [applause]
So yeah, protecting your intellectual, I mean that's what my company's all about, patenting and inventing and protecting that so that we can license it. Otherwise, I'm just doing stuff to give it away and eventually I'll die poor. [laughter]
Q: Hi, my question's very similar to the last. I'm wondering about invention in general. So you had your example of the rock and the smart phone. So, hundreds of years ago, almost anyone could take a rock and put it on a wooden stick and say they invented something.
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: I'm having trouble hearing.
Q: Sorry. Is this better?
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: Yeah.
Q: Okay, great. My question is, I feel like there's a big barrier to entry in the state of invention today. I was wondering if you could speak to advice for people who want to pursue that kind of path, how to go about it in today's modern day.
DR. LONNIE JOHNSON: I agree with you, there is a barrier; it's hard. And it's always been hard. I don't think it's ever been really easy, quite frankly. I got the idea for the Super Soaker in 1982. I was working on the Galileo project in the day time. When I finally got the first gun completed, by then I was actually back in the Air Force working on the B-2 program. And I set my basement up and I was building these things. The first gun worked great. I said, "Great, I'm going to set up a toy company, I'm going to make these things."
So I went and talked to a plastic injection modeling company that could mold and make all the parts and set up an assembly line and all this stuff. When it took a few weeks and they came back with a report, a proposal, saying, "Okay, Dr. Johnson, we've got this all figured out. It's going to cost $200,000 [audio out]" And I'm thinking, I don't have $200,000. [laughter] So I got stuck.
I see toys in the store that don't cost $200,000 and they're no more complicated than what I'm trying to do. What is it? Obviously, I realized there were some things I didn't know. I didn't know things about business, it turns out, about amortization and all these things. I don't think I had $200,000 worth of property that I could have used to collateralize a loan; and I don't know if my wife at the time would have gone along with that anyway. [laughter] So I was stuck.
So I decided there were some things I didn't know and that I needed to learn. And I felt that by licensing the gun to a toy company I could learn and see the product developed and so forth, get into production, and then I could have that knowledge and I could use it for my next idea. Because I assume that I'll have other ideas.
Well, the first company I talked to was called Daisy. They did pellet guns, soft pellets, airsoft, I think you may relate to it today. But these were actually BB guns that used copper BBs. But they were compressed air shotguns. They were excited about it because it was water; it was safer than BB guns that they were making at the time. And they tried to go into production. They took the gun to Hong Kong and took it apart and they contacted me later saying, "Well, we took it apart, we can't figure out how it was working. Could you make another one?" I made another one. And they literally got stuck.
I got frustrated with them. This was over a year, a couple years, actually, this back-and-forth with them. The owner of the company sold the company. And so I ended up talking to a new person. And then he bought it back and he rehired somebody else and it seems like every time I looked around, I was talking to somebody new and starting over. It was very frustrating.
Then I ended up talking to a company called Entertech. They had water guns on the market at the time. I was presenting a different toy that became a toy called Jammin' Jet; it was a water-propelled airplane. That's a whole different story. But I casually mentioned that I had a water gun and they said, "Wait a minute, we want the airplane, but we want the water gun, too." Well, I had to shut down the discussions that I was having with Daisy at the time so I could do a deal with them.
Turned out those guys were having a lot of infighting. They had a West Coast model shop and an East Coast model shop. They didn't get along. They were constantly criticizing each others' work. I was trying to reach the president to tell the president of the company, "Your company's going to get destroyed from inside with the way these guys, all this infighting going on. You've got to address this." I never could get through to anybody.
They ended up producing the airplane. They manufactured 60,000 airplanes, a million dollars into TV advertising, and every one, as soon as the kid got it out of the box, because of the way they designed it, it would fly up, roll over and slam into the ground right out of the box and break into a million pieces. And they never got the water gun out of the model shop. And they wouldn't listen to me. I tried calling. I said, "Don't design it that way."
Anyway, so by now it's 1989. So from '82 to '89, I'm still trying to find someone to produce these toys. Then I went to New York at Toy Fair, which is a big toy convention that they have every year where they have the buyers and the manufacturers. They get together and decide what they're going to order and put in stores. And I literally walked the halls looking for someone to talk to. And that's when I met the people at Larami.
And I was talking to the vice president of Larami and he says, "We'd be interested in water guns if you have something that's of interest, but I can't look at it now. Our headquarters is in Philadelphia. If you're ever in the area, drop in, I'd be happy to talk to you." I said, "Great." So I'm heading out the door, I'm thinking, okay, I hadn't got my prototype back from Entertech, the other company, so I had to make another gun. But as I was leaving, he says, "Oh, by the way, don't make a special trip." [laughter] Which means that, "It's very unlikely we're going to like what you have, so don't spend money coming to see us."
Anyway, I went back. I had to remake the gun. It took me a few weeks to get it finished and working. And then I called him up and said, "I'm going to be in your area next week, are you available?" So I did make a special trip. And it was classic, I was sitting in the waiting room with my suitcase with my prototype inside, just waiting to be called in. They were having a big meeting inside on the other side of the reception area. I'm sitting there patiently, and eventually they call me in. And I went in, opened my suitcase up. They said, "What do you have?" I took it out. Put some water in it, pumped it up. They're asking me, "How does it work? Does it work very well?"
And they were very skeptical, of course, but then when I pumped it up and shot it across the conference room, the president of the company said, wow! [laughter] And that was it. I had captured their imagination. [applause]
ALAN PRICE: Dr. Johnson, thank you so much for this inspirational presentation. I learned a lot, and you have truly demonstrated the power of perseverance in each of those stories.
Our next program in this room, a moon-themed musical performance and special closing ceremony, exactly 50 years after the moon landing, will begin at 3:50 pm. So we have a 20-minute break. In the meantime, there is one last great opportunity to try some of today's special interactive presentations and hands-on activities from now until 4:00, and to visit our Museum galleries which are open until 5:00.
But I would say, again, before you take your break, if we could have one more round of applause for Dr. Lonnie Johnson. [applause]
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