The Accidental Invention of the Super Soaker

The year is 1982. The first compact disc player is released. George R. R. Martin’s book A Game of Thrones is still 14 years from being published. And a teenager named Robert Wardhaugh starts a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Thirty-eight years later, Wardhaugh and his group of friend ...  Show more

When Jarrett Adams was 17 years old, he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 28 years in prison. Fueled by his desire for justice, Adams set out to prove his innocence from within the prison law library, despite never having opened a legal textbook in his life. After enlisti ...  Show more

How did a nuclear engineer end up inventing the Super Soaker water gun? This is the story of Lonnie Johnson, an inventor and engineer who, among many other things, revolutionized the backyard water pistol fight.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

Jill Lepore untangles the strange sci-fi roots of Silicon Valley's extreme capitalism - with its extravagant, existential and extra-terrestrial plans to save humanity. In this world, stock prices can be driven partly by fantasies found in blockbuster superhero movies, but that co ...  Show more

Putting lasers in space to blast Soviet missiles out of the air was a very real part of Ronald Reagan's defense policy. While his "Star Wars" program was derided at home and abroad, historians are beginning to wonder if it didn't help win the Cold War after all.

On this episode of Our American Stories, the comic book superhero is an American invention. Here to tell the story is WWII historian Jeffrey Johnson, the author of Super-History: Comic Book Superheroes and American Society.

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