Our phones do everything.
They find restaurants, maps, directions, settle arguments, define words, identify songs, play all of the music, talk to us, and thousands of other things.
Oh, and you can call people if you absolutely must.
That is today. It took a long time for us to get to this point.
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When Walter Lincoln Hawkins was born in 1911, telephones looked like this.
He was a curious kid from the start. He was one of those people who loved to take things apart. Oh yes, he most certainly did.
He would take one toy apart, put it back together and make a completely different toy. Yeah, it sounds like he broke it, but the sources I found made it sound like the second toy was sound.
He made little coil spring boats to sail in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
When he was eleven, he and a friend tried to make a perpetual motion machine. It isn't possible to build one of these, but such things never bother eleven-year-olds.
I'm pretty sure I had no idea what a perpetual motion machine was when I was eleven.
Walter was orphaned at an early age and was raised by his sister.
He applied himself in school, and never stopped tinkering, taking things apart, and reworking them.
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It had never occurred to Walter that anybody would pay him to tinker with mechanical things. He knew what he was going to do!
As so often happens, his intention to tinker with mechanical things for a living took off in a completely different direction when he got a little older.
He graduated from Dunbar and went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue. He graduated in 1932. The Great Depression was not a good time to find work, so he went back to school.
He went to Howard University and got a Master's Degree in Chemistry.
Still no work. More School!
He went to McGill University in Montreal, Canada and got a Doctorate in Chemistry.
Then...
Off to Columbia University to continue doing more research
Then?
He got a job!
in 1942 he made history as the first African American scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories. His specialty? Polymers. Okay, okay, plastic.
Back in the 1940s, most of the country did not have reliable telephone service if they had any at all. Telephone wires were encased in lead. Yes, poisonous, heavy, and expensive.
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Not only that, there were some plastics available, but they corroded quickly. This made laying long-distance cable unreasonable. Rural areas and isolated areas could not get phone service. In fact, there were plenty of outlying communities near cities that couldn't get phone service.
Dr. Hawkins' work at AT&T revolutionized how we insulate wires. He brought the world the first lightweight, durable polymers that could coat telephone wires. This allowed our entire country and pretty much the rest of the world to provide phone lines to communities that had been inaccessible.
He also created systems to recycle polymers.
Today, all of our fiber optic cable that allows our devices to work everywhere are coated with the polymers Hawkins designed.
"Hawkins was named Head of Plastics Chemistry R&D at Bell Labs and later, Assistant Director of the Chemical Research Laboratory. In 1963, he became Bell Labs' Supervisor of Applied Research, and in 1972, he was promoted to department head. Among his numerous technical achievements at Bell Labs was his design of a lab test using spectroscopy to predict the durability of a plastic surface. He also contributed to the development of techniques for recycling and reusing plastics. He published three books, more than 50 scientific papers, and earned 18 U.S. and 129 foreign patents. He was also very active as a mentor of disadvantaged and minority youth; he became the first chairman of the American Chemical Society's Project SEED (Summer Educational Experience for the Economically Disadvantaged)."
He retired from Bell Labs in 1976.
He stayed in New York and mentored young scientists and engineers. From 1976 - 1983 he was the research director of the Plastics Institute of America. (Who knew that was a thing?)
He also taught at New York's Polytechnic Institute and consulted with chemical and pharmaceutical companies.
He was honored with:
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In 1975 he was the first black engineer inducted into the National Academy of Engineering
Bell Lab's annual W. Lincoln Hawkins Mentoring Excellence Award is given in his honor
In 2010 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Walter Hawkins died in 1992.
So, go on...text or talk. Dr. Walter Hawkins has those wires covered!
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