Tuesday Tools

Good morning,
Grace and peace be unto you!

Thomas L. Jennings (1791-1859) was the first African American person to receive a patent in the U.S., paving the way for future inventors of color to gain exclusive rights to their inventions. Born in 1791, Jennings lived and worked in New York City as a tailor and dry cleaner. He invented an early method of dry cleaning called "dry scouring" and patented it in 1821—four years before Paris tailor Jean Baptiste Jolly refined his own chemical technique and established what many people claim was history’s first dry cleaning business.

People objected to an African American receiving a patent, but Jennings had a loophole: He was a free man. At the time, U.S. patent laws said that the "[slavemaster] is the owner of the fruits of the labor of the slave both manual and intellectual"—meaning slaves couldn't legally own their ideas or inventions, but nothing was stopping Jennings. Several decades later, Congress extended patent rights to all African American individuals, both slaves and freedmen.

Jennings used the money from his invention to free the rest of his family and donate to abolitionist causes.

Tuesday Tools

Good morning,
Grace and Peace be unto you.

Today in Tuesday Tools I want to share with you something that you might not have known.

Lonnie George Johnson
October 6, 1949 (age 67)
Mobile, Alabama
Williamson High School
Tuskegee University
Engineer, inventor
Known forSuper Soaker

Johnson is an American inventor and engineer who holds more than 80 patents.

Johnson is best known for inventing the Super Soaker water gun, which has ranked among the world's top 20 best-selling toys every year since its release.

While doing work with the U.S. Air Force, he still had time for his hobbies. This is when he first thought of the Super Soaker (officially there is not a space between Super and Soaker). On October 14, 1983 he applied for a U.S. patent. On May 27, 1986 he received patent number 4,591,071. Initially it was called the “Power Drencher” when it appeared in toy shops in 1990, but after some tweaks and remarketing, it got its official name. Selling between $10 to $60 depending on the model, the Super Soaker took off, generating $200 million in sales in 1991. Shortly after making the deal for the Super Soaker with the Larami Corporation, Larami became a subsidiary of Hasbro Inc. in February 1995. But being an inventor, Johnson came up with another idea: replacing the water in the SuperSoaker with a "toy [Nerf] projectile." In 1996, Johnson received patent US5553598 A for "Pneumatic launcher for a toy projectile and the like." These Nerf toy guns have generated millions for Hasbro and Johnson.

Unfortunately, Johnson discovered he was underpaid royalties for the Super Soaker and several "Nerf line of toys, specifically the N-Strike and Dart Tag brands." In November 2013, Johnson was awarded nearly $73 million in royalties from Hasbro Inc. in arbitration. According to Hasbro, the Super Soaker is approaching sales of $1 billion.