Lonnie Johnson, Inventor of the Super Soaker, 1992

Captured here: Lonnie Johnson, Inventor Of The Super Soaker, 1992. Made in 1992, it is the kind of image that turns a date in a history book into something you can actually see.

The 1990s were the last fully analog decade. The internet was just arriving in homes, film cameras still ruled, and the era's photographs carry the distinct warm grain of late-century color film.

Photographs like this one are a reminder that progress rarely moves in a straight line. For every invention that became part of daily life, dozens of confident prototypes ended up as curiosities — and the camera is often the only witness they left behind.