http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387128514/?tag=2022091-20
1984
Walter Hawkins was born on March 21, 1911 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, in the family of William Langston and Maude (Johnson) Hawkins. His father was a lawyer for the U.S. Census Bureau and his mother was a science teacher in the District of Columbia school system.
After graduating from high school he went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In 1932 he graduated with a chemical engineering degree. Then he enrolled in graduate school at Howard University, where in 1934, he earned a master's degree in chemistry. After that Hawkins enrolled at McGill, earned his Doctorate in Chemistry in 1939, and left to continue his research at Columbia University when he received a fellowship from the National Research Council.
A longtime employee of Bell Laboratories, W. Lincoln Hawkins was a chemical engineer whose work helped make universal telephone service possible. Hawkins, working at Bell Laboratories, helped to solve the problem of cables being insulated with a lead coating, which was very expensive by co-inventing a plastic coating that withstood heat and cold and had a life span of many decades.
Walter taught for a time in a trade school and then was convinced by a counselor at Howard University to apply for a fellowship in chemistry at McGill University in Canada. He accepted a position at Columbia University, where he would remain until 1942.
In 1942 Hawkins joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hills, New Jersey, the first African American scientist to be hired there. Hawkins would stay at Bell for the next thirty-four years, researching and inventing new materials and products for the preservation and recycling of plastics; he completed his career as assistant director of the Chemical Research Laboratory. Working together with Vincent Lanza in the late 1940s, he developed additives to create a new polymer that could resist both thermal degradation and the effects of oxidation and last up to seventy years in the elements.
But engineering was only part of Hawkins’s long and distinguished career. Retiring at age sixty-five, he remained a consultant to Bell on the education and employment of minorities. He also became research director for the Plastics Institute of America in Hoboken, New Jersey, from 1976 to 1983, and he worked privately as a materials consultant. In addition, he often spoke to minority youth about the importance of education. In 1981, he became the first chairman of the American Chemical Society’s Project SEED, a campaign to promote science careers to minority students around the country.
Hawkins worked for many years with the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, a committee set up by several major companies to propel minorities into the field. He was also a member and chair of the board of trustees of Montclair State College in New Jersey. This second career in counseling was as successful as his first in engineering, and the students listened to him as if he were a member of their own family.
Hawkins was frequently honored as a polymer chemistry pioneer. The first African-American to become a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Hawkins also won the International Medal of the Society of Plastics. In 1992 White House ceremony, he received the National Medal of Technology from President George H. W. Bush.
On August 19, 1939 Walter married Lilyan Varina Bobo, with whom he had two sons: Walter Gordon Hawkins and Philip Lincoln Hawkins.
