Originally reported Oct. 16, 2010. This archival update preserves the story’s time frame. The energy technology discussed below was research-stage work, not a proven promise to make solar power inexpensive.
Long before Mobile-born engineer Lonnie Johnson became widely known for the Super Soaker water gun, he was a young problem-solver in Mobile. Historical profiles identify Johnson as a 1949 Mobile native who attended the then all-Black Williamson High School during the era of legal segregation.
His career carried him from engineering studies at Tuskegee University to work for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center says Johnson worked on the Galileo mission to Jupiter while at JPL.
From a heat-pump experiment to a familiar toy
Johnson’s most famous invention grew out of thermal-engineering work. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recounts that a stream of water from a heat-pump experiment inspired him to develop a powerful toy water gun. That concept, first developed in 1982, eventually became the Super Soaker.
The success of that toy gave Johnson the freedom to keep pursuing engineering ideas outside the consumer-products market. By 2010, one of those ideas was a heat-to-electricity system associated with the Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, often called JTEC.
A carefully framed solar-energy prospect
The 2010 story presented JTEC as a possible route to more affordable solar power. The more precise description is that the proposed system was designed to turn a temperature difference into electricity. A U.S. patent application filed on Sept. 9, 2010 identifies Johnson as the inventor of an ambient-heat engine; it was published in 2012.
JTEC’s developer now describes the technology as an electrochemical converter that can use a heat differential to produce electricity. That is different from saying the system had already solved solar-power costs or reached broad commercial use. The historical record supports the narrower conclusion: in 2010, a Mobile native with a long engineering career was pursuing an ambitious energy-research concept.
A Mobile story with a longer scientific arc
Johnson’s local connection matters because the path began in Mobile well before the Super Soaker became a household name. His work joined a familiar invention story to a more complicated research question: how to make useful electricity from heat. The 2010 report is best read as an early chapter in that effort, not as a final verdict on the technology’s performance or cost.
Sources for this archival update: Encyclopedia of Alabama; U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; Smithsonian Lemelson Center; U.S. patent record; and JTEC Energy.