Robert Millikan

The Reverend Silas Millikan raised his second son on a Congregational minister's salary, first in Morrison, Illinois, then in Maquoketa, Iowa. Robert entered Oberlin College in 1886 to read Greek. In his sophomore year his Greek professor asked him to teach elementary physics to the preparatory students. He said he knew no physics at all and was told that anyone who could do well in Greek could teach it. He bought a textbook, spent the summer of 1889 learning the subject a week ahead of his class, and never left it. A Columbia doctorate followed in 1895, then a year in Berlin and Göttingen, then Chicago, where he taught, coauthored a successful run of textbooks, and produced no research anyone remembers. He was 41 before the experiment came.

The whole apparatus sat on a bench. Millikan sprayed oil into a chamber between charged plates, timed a droplet falling under gravity, then switched on the field until it hung motionless. The voltage that held it gave the charge it carried, and across hundreds of drops those charges came out as whole-number multiples of one small quantity. Electricity was not a fluid but a count. He then spent a decade trying to break Einstein's claim that light arrives in packets, measuring electrons knocked loose from clean metal by light. The equation held. The Nobel Prize came in 1923.

Gerald Holton opened the laboratory notebooks in the 1970s. The 1913 paper said its drops were not a selected group but all those observed over 60 consecutive days. The notebooks held many more runs than the 58 that appeared, some marked in the margin with Millikan's own verdict on whether they were worth keeping. Allan Franklin and David Goodstein call that ordinary experimental discretion and note the discarded drops would barely move the number. Others read it as a man tuning his data toward an answer he already trusted. Harvey Fletcher, the graduate student who ran much of the apparatus, left an account published in 1982, after his death, saying sole authorship of the key paper went to Millikan by an arrangement between them, with Fletcher taking sole credit on his dissertation instead. It has never been settled.

With George Ellery Hale and Arthur Noyes he turned a small Pasadena trade school into Caltech, and ran it from 1921 until 1945. He also sat on the board of the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena organization that promoted compulsory sterilization, praised his own suburb as the westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization, and in 1936 advised the president of Duke to hire young men rather than a woman physicist. No woman joined the Caltech faculty in his 24 years. In January 2021, after a naming review, the trustees stripped his name from the buildings and honors. The library became Caltech Hall. He died in San Marino on December 19, 1953, at 85.

Robert Millikan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A First Course in Physics book
  With Henry Gale — the start of a long-running textbook series 1906
• Oil-drop measurement of the elementary charge discovery
  Charge comes in whole-number multiples of one unit 1913
• A Direct Photoelectric Determination of Planck's h discovery
  The experiment he built to disprove Einstein and could not 1916
• The Electron book
  His own account of isolating and measuring it 1917
• Cosmic ray research discovery
  He coined the term — and lost the argument with Arthur Compton over what the rays were 1925
• Evolution in Science and Religion book
  From his Terry Lectures at Yale 1927

• March 22, 1868 aged 0 Born in Morrison, Illinois, the second son of a Congregational minister
• 1889 aged ~21 Teaches physics at Oberlin having never studied it His Greek professor told him that anyone who could do well in Greek could teach physics. He bought a textbook and spent the summer catching up.
• 1895 aged ~27 Takes a Columbia doctorate, then a year in Berlin and Göttingen
• 1909 aged ~41 Begins the oil-drop work at Chicago with his student Harvey Fletcher
• 1913 aged ~45 Publishes the measurement of the elementary charge His value ran slightly low because he used an inaccurate figure for the viscosity of air.
• 1916 aged ~48 Confirms the photoelectric equation he had set out to overturn He kept objecting to Einstein's interpretation for years afterward, and accepted it in his 1950 autobiography.
• 1921 aged ~53 Leaves Chicago to run Caltech and its physics laboratory
• 1923 aged ~55 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
• December 19, 1953 aged 85 Dies in San Marino, California, at 85 His wife Greta had died three months earlier.

• George Ellery Hale 1868–1938
  Built four telescopes that were each the largest in the world, and found that sunspots are magnetic built Caltech with
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. tested and confirmed
• Theodore von Karman 1881–1963
  Aerodynamics, the Karman vortex street, and the founding of JPL recruited
• Linus Pauling 1901–1994
  Chemist and peace activist who won two unshared Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace. hired
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. brought to Caltech