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W. LINCOLN HAWKINS, a leader in the engineering of polymeric materials for long service life, died at his home in San Marcos, California, on August 20, 1992. Hawkins was employed with Bell Telephone Laboratories (now AT&T Bell Laboratories) from 1942 to 1976. He was assistant director of the Chemical Research Laboratory at the time of his retirement. From 1976 to 1983 he was director of research of the Plastics Institute of America and was also active as an independent materials consultant and an expert witness.
Hawkins was born in Washington, D.C., on March 21, 1911. He attended public schools in Washington and was inspired to enter a technical career by a high school teacher, Dr. James Cowen. He persisted in his studies through the difficult years of the 1930s and received a B.S. in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1932), an M.S. in chemistry from Howard University (1934), and a Ph.D. in chemistry from McGill University in 1938. Hawkins taught at McGill from 1938 to 1941 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University from 1940 to 1942. His doctoral thesis involved the chemistry of lignin, an important component of wood that must be removed in the making of paper. This work resulted in sixteen publications.
Hawkins's arrival at Bell Labs coincided with the beginning of the age of polymers (''plastics'' in vernacular usage, but the field also includes elastomers, thermosets, and other types).
Hawkins was drawn to telecommunications applications of organic materials. He was well aware of a strong prejudice against the use of organics in "quality" products, justifiably based on oxidation and degradation of useful properties. During the 1950s Hawkins and his colleagues made critical contributions to the field of polymer stabilization, which enabled the replacement of lead sheath for cables with polyethylene.
Polyethylene is subject to degradation through photo and thermal oxidation and the tough, flexible polymer becomes brittle and unsuitable to protect the cable. For cable sheath, carbon black is an effective additive to screen out the ultraviolet light that causes photooxidation, but carbon black was antagonistic to the additives used in the 1950s to retard thermal oxidation. Hawkins (and V. L. Lanza) found a thermal antioxidant that performed well (even better) in the presence of carbon black, and this combination was the basis of their patent.
Communications cable is a product that is expensive to produce and install, and basic changes in materials are accepted only after extensive validation of any innovation. Hawkins appreciated the importance of proven integrity and was a prime mover in a program to establish a methodology for accelerated aging based on oxygen uptake. The program was successful and led to widespread acceptance of the Hawkins stabilization package. This is an early example of the use of plastics in a demanding application requiring long service life (forty years!). As a bonus, huge quantities of lead were eliminated from installation.
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