Lonnie George Johnson Inventor of the Super Soaker Water Gun

Lonnie George Johnson 

(born October 6, 1949)

 Out of both interest and economic necessity, Johnson’s father was a skilled handyman who taught his six children to build their own toys. 

When Johnson was still a small boy, he and his dad built a pressurized china berry shooter out of bamboo shoots.

 At the age of 13, Johnson attached a lawnmower engine to a go-kart he built from junkyard scraps and raced it along the highway until the police pulled him over.

NASA/GSFC Inventor of the Year honors in 1984 was received by George Edward Alcorn Jr.

George Edward Alcorn Jr.

Born March 22, 1940

X-Ray Spectrometer US Patent No. 4,472,728 Inducted in 2015  

• Born in 1940 in Indianapolis, IN
• Attended Occidential College on scholarship and graduated with honors, with a B.S. in Physics, while also participating on basketball and football teams.
• Earned a Master of Science in Physics in 9 months from Howard University in 1963.
• After years as a physicist & engineer at IBM, Alcorn left to work for NASA in 1978
• As Second Plateau Inventor at NASA, he invented an imaging x-ray spectrometer for which he earned a patent, as well as NASA/GSFC Inventor of the Year honors in 1984
•  He served on a project management team that developed technologies used on the space station Freedom  
• Alcorn has been an integral part in managing the 30 year mission of the space station, overseeing the GSFC Evolution Program. 
• In all George Alcorn, Jr. is responsible for over 20 inventions

In 2010, Dr. Alcorn received the highest award of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, The Robert H. Goddard Award of Merit

George Edward Alcorn

(1940 – )

Physicist, Engineer

Dr. Alcorn earned a B.A. from Occidental College, majoring in physics and winning letters in football and baseball. He completed graduate work in physics at Howard University.

Dr. Alcorn’s achievements have elicited honors from many institutions and organizations, including Howard University, NASA, and IBM, along with special recognition from the United States Congress. 

In 2010, Dr. Alcorn received the highest award of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the Robert H. Goddard Award of Merit, “for outstanding innovation and significant contributions to space science, technology, and NASA programs as an engineer, a physicist, a professor and an inventor.”