Word: soaker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...third, one he felt was the perfect science-meets-nature theme for every Shaklee line. The new dishwasher-powder label shows a stack of plates lined up next to leaf fronds; a tub of scouring paste depicts green leaves rising from a heavy-duty pan; the laundry stain soaker has not only the requisite plant material but a puppy too. "When you look at it, when you're sitting around your home, it reinforces that you're doing a good thing," says Barnett. "And there's no sacrifice you have to make. In the green movement, people felt they were...
...rest, as they say, is history. Johnson, a small-town prodigy called the Professor by his high school buddies, had wrought one of the best-selling toys ever: the Super Soaker, a pump-action water gun capable of streaming water 50 feet. In the 12 years since he first got U.S. Patent No. 4,591,071 for the "squirt gun," as it is listed in official government records, more than 200 million Super Soakers have been sold. Revenue estimates for the gun range as high as $400 million. "Lonnie is the American success story," says Dick Apley, director of independent...
...Super Soaker is just one of 62 patents (with an additional 18 pending approval) that Johnson has amassed since his basement days. He's had ideas for hair-drying rollers, a digital thermostat, a baby-diaper detector that activates musical nursery rhymes when wet, and a device that measures soil moisture and waters grass automatically. Many of his ideas never went further than the prototype. He didn't have the money or the contacts in those early days to push them into production. "There are all kinds of ways to skin a cat, and there are all kinds of mousetraps...
...invented refrigerated trucks, the woman who developed a machine for hair permanents or the man who patented the automatic traffic signal. Officials from the Patent Office, which reports that only 6% of patent applications come from blacks, hail Johnson as a role model and cite his Super Soaker to capture the imagination of schoolchildren...
...during the space-probing missions that he happened upon his idea for the Super Soaker. He dubbed his creation a "pneumatic water gun" and made his first prototype from PVC pipe, a plastic Coke bottle and Plexiglas. Then he turned loose his six-year-old daughter Aneka on the neighborhood. Kids and adults alike went nuts over...