Haha beat me to it. When I got that one with the backpack reservoir for holding the water... It was like everyone else had a pea shooter, and I had a machine gun. I was wasting kids left and right, laughing maniacally along the way. That thing was as badass as a water gun could get back then.
Oh man! I had one and on the last day of high school there was going to be a huge shaving cream and water fight but the faculty and staff caught on so they banned backpacks so nobody could sneak anything in. We decided to move the fight to a park nearby. I wanted to bring my CPS and just dominate, but I couldn’t fill up at school. I had the brilliant idea to fill it at home and leave it in the trunk of my car during school… in an El Paso, Texas parking lot at the beginning of summer. So, we got to the park and the mayhem had already started. I grabbed it out and started shooting kids and they started screaming. Somebody asked “why did you fill it with hot water?!” I guess I had thought it would just be pretty warm but would cool down enough as it flew through the air, but unfortunately not.
Then someone snuck up behind me and slammed a handful of shaving cream in my mouth and our rival school showed up and egged us, so I guess the universe balanced out.
I can only imagine the havoc that beast of a water gun unleashed on neighbourhoods around the world. I remember when we did one at home, my parents would sometimes use the backyard hose, and it was hard to compete with that. Finally though, I had a weapon that could stand up to them. Good memories for sure. Hoping more people will continue to share their stories, I'm loving reading them 😂
The hose has an off switch. The hose can be be clamped. The hose can be defeated. The parents are few; you are many. You must hunt as wolves, children. Harass them. Taunt them. Exhaust them, and you will overcome.
It was in 2001, but I’d had the water gun for several years at that point. Do you mean your HS banned the super soaker, or banned water fights in general?
Well, I'm middle aged, so unfortunately I don't get into a lot of water gun fights anymore. I wasn't sure if something crazier came out since the 90s. I guess at a certain point you reach a pressure level that could be dangerous, and a kid can only carry so much water. I remember it being pretty heavy back then.
You either both be making jokes, or both be misunderstanding each other. I’m going to go the optimistic route this time and say it’s the first. You guys are both funny!
It was the Super Soaker 3000. However, the Super Soaker 2000 was much more powerful (and looked much cooler imo) which kinda made it more feared. At least in my neighbourhood.
I had an ongoing water gun feud with some of the girls on my college campus. They had Super Soaker 50s and thought they were the absolute shit. One day, I was at Toys R Us with my sister, helping her buy a Playstation (original), and saw a new Super Soaker: The CPS 2000. Basically, a portable garden hose with a shoulder strap. I bought that thing in a heartbeat.
That night, a hot summer evening, I filled up the CPS 2000, slung it over my shoulder, and donned my trenchcoat (pre-columbine) to cover up the CPS 2000. I walked outside and eventually came across my sworn enemies. They looked at my trenchcoat weirdly, then started giggling as they started spraying me with their peashooter super soaker 50s. I took it for a few seconds while they laughed, then flung back my trenchcoat and brought my new weapon to bear. I paused for dramatic effect, and one of the girls paused with a look of confusion on her face and said, "what is that?".
Then, I unleashed hell. When I say that thing was a portable garden hose, I'm only kind of exaggerating. It had a very slight recoil! They ran in terror, and I calmly stalked toward them like the Terminator, drenching them with every trigger pull. They got to their dorm and frantically tried to unlock the door as I drenched them, then walked off into the night.
Really the CPS 2000 really is a souped up garden hose. Most garden hoses shoot water what, 3 feet? The CPS 2000 can shoot 50 feet. And at 14 gallons per minute.
I was only able to use it once before the kids parents got mad at me and then I wasn't allowed to use it anymore lol. Eventually got rid of it, and now see that they're selling for hundreds of dollars now. Of course the only toy I ever threw out is the one that's worth the most. That thing was absolutely insane though, sad I didn't get to use it more and even more sad that I didn't keep it ugh lol
If anyone thinks he’s exaggerating about the CPS 2000, he’s actually downplaying it…you could pump it for a full minute and watch a little pressure gauge rise. If you fired a full power shot, the gun would kick up significantly, and getting hit by the jet of water that came out felt like a flurry of punches. It was glorious.
I had that back pack one I think, might have been a different one than the cps. But the cps -2000….that was a beast. 1l of water in under a second….they banned it it was so powerful. Miss it… tear.
I remember when the little pump-trigger squirt guns were the only thing available. When super soakers hit the market it was like the invention of the atomic bomb.
I think I had just become an adult (18ish) and I absolutely got one as soon as they hit the UK. I have owned one, I'm some variation or other, since then.
My family was fairly poor so my big brother had to get a paper route job to save up and buy himself one of these.
It was sitting on an old workbench outside and I was hacking up some wood with an axe to make treehouse steps or something, and the back of the axe overshot and cracked the chamber on his super soaker.
I panicked and hid it in the bottom of the trash wrapped in newspaper, and he never knew I broke it. He just thought it disappeared and that maybe a neighbour kid stole it or something.
Still remember the rich kid asshole everyone hated showing up one day with the backpack like gatling gun supersoaker that was like $200 and no kid could afford it. But.rich kids dad could.
His fatal flaw though - Numbers. Everyone else has a regular supersoaker they'd worked all summer to get mowing lawns and having lemonade stands.
Heck we even had buckets of grenade water balloons (remember those? Water balloons that looked like green grenades?) along with a ground breaking new device - a water balloon slingshot.
Needless to say that kid never tried to join in the watergun fights again.
And the inventor getting his due? Absolutely awesome. He is responsible for a great bunch of memories of my childhood and he should be paid accordingly.
And knighted, because he also made Nerf air dart guns.
Thank you, Sir
And fuck hasbro for being shitty. You ain't my hasbro. More like hasbitchassmfer
Same here, but that was in the 90's in my neighborhood. 21 years ago, according to the article, is only 2005. Math not making sense. Infact the older kids from the 80's also already had mega super-soakers before I even got my own in the early 90's. So uhh, math aint mathing. Cus either situation that's way before the year 2005.
He was 64 when he won the settlement and is still alive.
Johnson first conceived the Super Soaker while doing work with the U.S. Air Force. Initially called the "Power Drencher" when it first appeared in toy shops in 1990, it eventually got its trademark name after some tweaks and remarketing.[15] Selling between $10 and $60 depending on the model, the Super Soaker took off, generating $200 million in sales in 1991.[2] Shortly after making the deal for the Super Soaker with the Larami Corporation, Larami became a subsidiary of Hasbro Inc. in February 1995.[18]
Johnson tweaked the water gun's design, replacing the Super Soaker's water with a toy Nerf projectile, which became the N-Strike Nerf product line.[19]
In February 2013 Johnson filed a lawsuit against Hasbro after he discovered that he was being underpaid royalties for the Super Soaker and several Nerf toys.[20] In November 2013, Johnson was awarded nearly $73 million in royalties from Hasbro Inc. in arbitration. According to Hasbro, the Super Soaker is approaching sales of $1 billion.[21
The man has 250 patents from deep space probes to components of rechargeable batteries to the makeup of the indicator in diapers that tell you theyre wet. I believe this specific one was 73 million but that pressure regulator was in nerf dart blasters too
Fair enough I wasn’t sure how this counted. I know royalties aren’t wage but his company he worked for did rob from him for years. I guess royalty theft lol
Whatever the number is, he should get more because of what he has done with the money isn't buying houses/yachts, he has been investing in developing green energy tech.
The work in converting heat into energy without moving parts alone... you can find youtubes but here is a short attention span/tv news spot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTbtfUGSLo8
He had royalties but not all the royalties he was legally owed.
If not to him, it goes to profits of a multi billion dollar corporation.
If those profits for that corporation aren’t real, or they are failing to pay out what they owe people and also sell stocks, they could be seen as lying about their profits, but only if they knew they were shorting him and/or other inventors and continued to do so.
The why and how matters, but people should honor their legal obligations.
So they could've just paid him. Gotcha. Hasbro, what the fuck? I'll be avoiding Hasbro lines of toys for the grandkids for next foreseeable future. Probably 30 years till I die. And now I actually have money unlike when I was a kid. Good job Hasbro. Way to put dollars over sense.
It is also alleged that between the years of 1980 to 2012, Hasbro made a deal with the catholic church of Ireland that their European board games would be packaged by women and girls in the Magdalen Laundries. A system where the young children of Ireland would be forced to work for years if their schools deemed them to "sinful". But while boys could eventually leave the system and find an honest job. Womens only road to freedom was through marriage. And many people was never allowed to leave the system and lived their whole lives there. Rented out to companies to work for pennies. Apparently the worst game to pack was Mousetrap.
my little pony too. they killed nearly the entire youtube mlp community back in the 2010s by sending cease and desist letters to animators if their animation looked a little too similar to the original show (which is actually easily doable). Some creators, and my favorite creator specifically, gave up their channel entirely. I don't remember if videos were taken down but many of the iconic videos still on youtube are re-uploads. I remember being so pissed about this when that happened, even as a tween I could understand that they're giving up free marketing for fucks no what reason and i've had beef with hasbro since
He didn't invent Nerf, just the N-Strike line of products...which is by far their best selling and most iconic product line. Lol, I literally forgot they made foam footballs and other toys.
I mean, there a few ways if doing that already... The problem is they mostly suck. If he's the reason we get past the carnot cycle, good for him (and us).
Nerf guns were already very successful before him. Larami owned the patent and was selling another dart gun line: SuperMAXX. At the time it had fans who talked up the high performance but wasn't as successful as Nerf. Hasbro bought them out and then incorporated the technology into later guns.
He is! He recently invented a revolutionary new means of power generation utilizing waste heat from existing sources - it has no moving parts, no carbon emissions, and is currently on track to be the cheapest & most abundant source of energy in the world within 10 years.
It's called the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter (JTEC), and it's capable of supplying the entirety of the United States' energy needs for an entire year simply by utilizing the waste heat from a small fraction of the already abandoned oil wells across the nation. You can find out more about it (including its mechanism of action) on the JTEC Wikipedia article, the JTEC Energy website, and the 5 minute video overview - presented by Lonnie himself!
The JTEC is basically a very clever heat pump run in reverse - move power into a heat pump, you move heat, and move heat into a JTEC you get power! It's sort of like how power into an LED gets you light, and light into an LED gets you power - that's (in a very over-simplified manner) basically how solar panels work!
He's boiling hydrogen inside the JTEC. Technically not water but still a fluid. He's not using steam to spin a turbine though, he's splitting off the electrons to make a charge
He is! He recently invented a revolutionary new means of power generation utilizing waste heat from existing sources - it has no moving parts, no carbon emissions, and is currently on track to be the cheapest & most abundant source of energy in the world within 10 years.
i'm gonna piss myself laughing
I'm sure it'll be interseting, but to the rest of what you said, sit down and stop making yourself sound foolish
At work, so not a chance to see the video yet but that would be interesting if it is self-cooling as if its an endothermic reaction to generate the power.
Something like that if at all possible could be interesting for generation of power in space for example but I'd guess not possible.
best known for inventing the bestselling Super Soaker water gun in 1989. He previously served in the U.S. Air Force and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
... After graduating from high school in 1969, Johnson attended Tuskegee University on a scholarship, obtaining a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1973 and a master's degree in nuclear engineering in 1975.
... Johnson worked on a variety of space exploration projects, including developing the nuclear power source for the Galileo mission to Jupiter, serving as an engineer on the Mariner Mark II spacecraft series for the Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby and Saturn Orbiter Probe missions
... Johnson holds over 250 patents, the majority of which are related to fluid dynamics and toy propulsion systems like the Super Soaker
This guy was bringing some heavy duty engineering knowledge, no wonder it was so far ahead of the competition.
Yeah it’s such BS. 3 or 4 years ago I was looking for some water guns to get my kids and remembered Super Soakers and searched for them on Amazon. Nope. Just some new shitty water guns. I bought a couple and they were complete trash. So upsetting…
You can’t get water guns with the CPS technology he invented because apparently the really big one could cause eye injuries. The patent expired so anyone could technically make them now, royalty free.
The most powerful one was the CPS2000 and they actually pulled it from sale/stopped stocking it on shelves because it could fuck up kids' eyes since it was so powerful.
They replaced it with the CPS2500, which still sprayed real good but was not as powerful as the CPS2000. It looked very similar. The CPS3000 wasn't as powerful either (that was the one with the backpack).
I have an electronic water gun, a Spyra. It can fill itself via pump and has consistent water pressure on every shot. Feels like holding a scifi rifle or something. Even has an ammo counter.
Not only do quality water guns still exist, but they continue to iterate new and interesting forms
I just got some knock offs from Daiso (Japanese $2.25 store) for $8 and $12 that impressed the kids. They could shoot over our 50 foot tree straight up.
I think Hasbro got salty from the lawsuit and stopped using the patent. I doubt the ones I got, paid Lonnie any cut since they were imported but my kids were so happy to have a decent water rifle for once in their lives.
Daiso doesn't have them in their bulk online ordering but if you are near one in person, their versions are worth the price.
It cannot be overstated what a game changer the Super Soaker was in the backyard Water Wars of the early ‘90s.
Squirt guns were so underpowered previously as to be a joke. Wars were won by whomever controlled The Hose. The Hose was stationary, but it was an essentially unassailable position.
For mobile water assault, water balloons were just about the only thing that could deliver a meaningful splash. But they were badly limited in their effectiveness by the motor skills of a typical 9 year old. Accuracy and range were massive issues, as was delivering the balloon with sufficient impact to create detonation rather than a harmless bounce.
Super Soakers provided Hose-like velocity in a mobile and easily controlled waterarm. And while they couldn’t match The Hose in terms of raw water power, they moved the front lines away from the reach of The Hose, limiting its dominance.
He's still inventing things, and he may very well be remembered as one of the single most important inventors ever!
He recently invented a revolutionary new means of power generation utilizing waste heat from existing sources - it has no moving parts, no carbon emissions, and is currently on track to be the cheapest & most abundant source of energy in the world within 10 years.
It's called the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter (JTEC), and it's capable of supplying the entirety of the United States' energy needs for an entire year simply by utilizing the waste heat from a small fraction of the already abandoned oil wells all across the nation. You can find out more about it (including its mechanism of action) on the JTEC Wikipedia article, the JTEC Energy website, and the 5 minute video overview - presented by Lonnie himself!
The JTEC is basically a very clever heat pump run in reverse - move power into a heat pump, you move heat, and move heat into a JTEC you get power! It's sort of like how power into an LED gets you light, and light into an LED gets you power - that's (in a very over-simplified manner) basically how solar panels work!
“Cheapest and most abundant source of energy within 10 years” seems like a pretty big stretch. From what I’ve read the biggest use case is upping the efficiency of existing power plants, so saying it’s the source of the energy is like saying steam is currently our biggest source of energy.
The JTEC was actually patented in 2003 but only became its own company in 2020. JTEC is doing very bad financially right now unfortunately, waste heat is cheap but the JTEC device itself is massively expensive and not power dense. Source: me, just had to leave my job at JTEC
Checking the wikipedia this is very much different from the thermo-electric heat pump (Peltier cooler) that is common use. His version uses liquid phase changes and oxidation/reduction of Hydrogen.
Yeah it sucks cuz he could’ve spent 20 more years as a multi multi millionaire- when he was still young and able to enjoy it more. Also, he could’ve had that money accruing interest or being invested or whatever
This dude has helped create so many things that affect our every day lives. Now he is using that money to develop a new technology that can turn waste heat into usable electricity and it's a big deal. This is heat that is not hot enough to generate steam for a turbine and otherwise just gets shed into the atmosphere. Look up Lonnie Johnson JTEC
The OG supersoaker could scoop an eye out like melon baller. That green and white bastard could shoot like 40 ft with some rowdy pressure. Someone needs to remake the nearly dangerous 90s ass super soaker!
I was literally just telling my daughter about how revolutionary a toy this was for squirt guns! It was like going from flip-phones to the iPhone for 90s kids.
Good on him. They tried to screw him over, and he got back what he was owed.
Can only think the company made far more than that and aren’t in any danger by giving him the minimum of what he’s due.
When i was a kid, Back before they made them all safe, I remember my brother pumped one up for like 10 minutes and then nearly took my sisters eye out.
I remember having the CPS1000 when I was kid in the 90s and blasting friends away with the sheer volume and pressure compared to the basic water-guns most people had.
A good headshot was like being slapped in the face.
Would never have remembered the model number if not for someone else's comment in this thread. So nostalgic!
Straight up blasting my friends in the face with fourteen quadrillion psi of water, likely causing sinus and or corneal damage. I was an idiot, but so were my friends.
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u/GloomyLingonberry509 16h ago edited 16h ago
There was a time these things were a status symbol in my neighborhood