Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie George Johnson is an American inventor, aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, born in Mobile, Alabama, on 6 October 1949. He served in the U.S. Air Force and worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, and he is best known for inventing the bestselling Super Soaker water gun in 1989. In the energy field he is the inventor of the Johnson thermoelectric energy converter, a solid state heat engine that uses the electrochemical oxidation and reduction of hydrogen in a two cell thermal cycle to approximate the Ericsson cycle and is under investigation as a high efficiency alternative to conventional thermoelectric generators and mechanical heat engines.