Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie George Johnson grew up in Mobile, Alabama, one of six children. As a child, he built a go-kart from junkyard scraps and nearly burned down his house experimenting with rocket fuel. His high school nickname was "The Professor."

Johnson earned a master's in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University and went to work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn. He also served as a nuclear engineer in the U.S. Air Force.

In 1990, while working on a heat pump that used water instead of Freon, Johnson accidentally shot a powerful stream of water across his bathroom. The result was the Super Soaker — which went on to generate over $1 billion in sales and became one of the top 20 bestselling toys of all time. Johnson holds over 100 patents and now runs Johnson Research & Development, where he is developing JTEC — a solid-state heat engine that could revolutionize solar energy conversion.