Partnership Educators,
Lonnie stood and waited for the judges to come by and take a look at his masterpiece. The high school science fair had been a goal for Lonnie and he had made a robot using compressed air. As the judges approached they were taken by the looks of the object. Lon explained and demonstrated his invention and the first prize was handed over shortly thereafter. In 1968, a functioning robot was still something of science fiction except that this high schooler had pulled it off. Lonnie went on to graduate from Tuskegee University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1973 and a master's degree in nuclear engineering in 1975.
He went to work for the US Air Force and received his first patent in 1979 for a device that read binary-encoded information from a photographically reduced scale. At the time, Lonnie was just inventing things as a hobby and so he didn't really pursue his patent. Later this became the basics for how CDs and DVDs are read. He knew that this idea was "the big fish that got away."
Later Lonnie took a job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on the development of the B2 Stealth Bomber and the Galileo and Cassini space missions. It was at that same time when he got the "accidental" idea that would make him famous.
He was working in his bathroom in 1982, trying to figure out a new type of heat pump that used water instead of Freon. As he experimented with nozzles he had developed, a squirt of water shot across the bathroom. It was at this point that Lonnie thought that this would be fun to play with.
The first prototype of his device was made of PVC pipe, Plexiglas, and a two-liter bottle. After working with his device, he received a patent for it in 1986. After many disappointing rejection letters, Lon finally found Larami Corporation to manufacture his new device called the Power Drencher. You know it better with its current and most popular name the Super Soaker. Hasbro had turned down Lonnie Johnson for his invention in 1989 but paid $73 million to Lonnie after acquiring it in 1995. Lonnie Johnson went on to take those same ideas and invent the Nerf projectile guns as well.
Innovation comes from a variety of places. It comes from curiosity and the tinkering of thoughts and ideas. The mixture or blending of the old and new to create solutions, products, and services. Mostly what we don't read about in stories like this, are the many failures that happened before the one success. Our students need to have opportunities to tinker with content and ideas and be afforded the time to fail and learn to build success from that failure. We should never be in such a hurry to teach material that we forget why we are teaching it and who needs to learn it. I have lots of years over my lifetime to be able to tinker with the concepts that I know and can do. Some of that knowledge has certainly deepened over the course of those years and a greater understanding has developed. I always look forward to new opportunities to learn and continue the march to deeper understanding.
Thanks to all of our staff for engaging with our students each day in whatever capacity that it might be to help them build a deeper understanding of what it means to be a learner. Socrates wrote, "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." Alvin Toffler, a writer, futurist, and businessman, once put it this way. "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." This isn't to say the reading and writing will not be important but that having the ability to be adaptable and persevere is equally as important.
Have a fantastic weekend,
Rob