Super Soaker
A pressurized water gun invented after-hours by a NASA engineer working on an eco-friendly heat pump — it went on to sell 200 million units and top $1 billion in sales.
The Super Soaker is the pump-pressurized water gun that could shoot far further than any squirt gun before it, turning backyard water fights into a genuine arms race of range and capacity. Its origin story is one of the more remarkable in toy history — it came from serious aerospace engineering, not a toy designer's sketchpad.
Invented by a NASA engineer working on something else entirely
Lonnie Johnson, a nuclear engineer who had worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, invented the underlying pressurized-nozzle mechanism in 1982 while experimenting with a heat pump that used water instead of Freon — he noticed the stream of water shooting across his bathroom and immediately recognized its potential as a toy rather than an appliance.
Johnson, who has no formal toy-industry background, had to personally pitch the invention (originally called the "Power Drencher") to executives at Larami, a maker of inexpensive plastic toys, before it launched in 1990.
A billion-dollar toy — and a hard-won royalty fight
The rebranded Super Soaker sold 2 million units after a 1991 TV ad push, and Larami's aggressive marketing moved 27 million units in the product's first three years alone. Hasbro eventually acquired Larami in 1995 specifically because of the Super Soaker's success.
Johnson later had to pursue a legal dispute over unpaid royalties from Hasbro, reportedly settling for around $73 million — one of the largest known royalty settlements paid to an individual toy inventor, and a reminder that even a billion-dollar hit doesn't guarantee its creator gets paid fairly without a fight.
