Lonnie Johnson

I can remember times when we'd be having parties, and people would be dancing and everything and I would be sitting there in the middle doing calculus, just doing my little thing.

I didn't want to grow old and find that I didn't do what I could have done, that I didn't put my best foot forward. I didn't want to have any regrets.

When I think back on my childhood and the things that happened to me, there were certain periods of time where I felt like I was being saved for something. I feel like I have a gift, and it would be a sin to waste it.

Nobody's going to step in and dump a lot of money and make it easy. Unless you have a lot of money, you have to pay your dues and make a personal sacrifice.

I decided I could develop a toy and get some revenue from that and then use that revenue to really become an inventor and work on some of the more challenging projects I had in mind.

I love playing around with ideas and turning them into something useful or fun.

That's one of the advantages of being an inventor and tinkerer - I have everything I need to make what I need.

Lady Luck is indifferent. She smiles sometimes, and she frowns sometimes.

As an inventor, it's a rite of passage to have an engine. I'd like to have my own engine someday.

I don't think there's any project that I started that I ever stopped working on.

Sitting still, a person produces about 100 watts of heat. What if you could use that to charge your cell phone?

I consider myself a general practitioner. I do electronic things. I do toys and water things, mechanical stuff. I'm very, very flexible.

There was a time in my life when I was independently wealthy.

Especially when you have a lot of technology you're developing as a small company, trying to protect that technology is a real problem.

More and more, other countries are able to manufacture things cheaper, beating us in the marketplace in a lot of ways. So we need to do whatever we can to make sure America's ability to protect its ingenuity is as strong as it can be.

I think America's strength is in innovation.

I've invented a new type of engine that converts heat directly into electricity with no moving mechanical parts. It's called the Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, the JTEC.

Large companies can afford to file patents on every idea they have. Small companies, we have to weigh our options, do the research. We have to decide where to place our bets. We can't just cover everything we do.

It was because of the success of the Super Soaker, I was able to at least get an audience with people to present some of my other ideas.

I would say that engineering has been a very positive experience overall, but usually coming into the situation it would be one of being underestimated. People would actually have low expectations. But I would take advantage of it quite honestly, because I would take my time to underestimate the situation.

I got my first patent in 1979 before I left the Air Force. I called it the Digital Distance Measuring Instrument. It used ones and zeros and dots and dashes and a magnifying lens to read binary-encoded information from a scale that was photographically reduced. It used the same kind of technology that's used in CDs and DVDs.

You sometimes have a very innovative company, and if they come up with one idea, they can come up with many more - if they're successful. If they can't feed themselves, you lose that creativity.

Persevere. That's what I always say to people. There's no easy route.

Peer review is fine, as long as you're making incremental improvements to a technology.

I've always liked to tinker with things.