Robert Millikan

Robert Millikan (born March 22, 1868, Morrison, Illinois, U.S.—died December 19, 1953, San Marino, California) was an American physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his study of the elementary electronic charge and the photoelectric effect.

Millikan graduated from Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio) in 1891 and obtained a doctorate at Columbia University in 1895. In 1896 he became an assistant at the University of Chicago, where he became a full professor in 1910. During his time in Chicago as an assistant professor, he wrote for high-school and college students several physics textbooks that entered widespread use.

In 1909 Millikan began a series of experiments to determine the electric charge carried by a single electron. He began by measuring the course of charged water droplets in an electric field. The results suggested that the charge on the droplets is a multiple of the elementary electric charge, but the experiment was not accurate enough to be convincing. He obtained more precise results in 1910 with his famous oil-drop experiment in which he replaced water (which tended to evaporate too quickly) with oil. Millikan varied the electric voltage between two metal plates as an oil drop fell between them until the drop stopped falling. When the drop was stationary, the downward force of gravity on the drop equaled the upward electrical force on the charges in the drop, and then Millikan could measure how much charge the drop had.

In 1916 he took up with similar skill the experimental verification of the equation introduced by Albert Einstein in 1905 to describe the photoelectric effect, in which electrons are ejected from a metal plate when light falls on it. The photoelectric effect had puzzled physicists, but Einstein described the energy of the ejected electron as equal to hf - φ, where h is Planck’s constant, f is the frequency of the light, and φ is a property of the metal called the work function. Einstein’s description of the photoelectric effect as a quantum phenomenon was controversial, but Millikan’s measurements proved Einstein’s theory and obtained an accurate value of Planck’s constant. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he became vice chairman of the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., where he helped scientists apply their research to the war effort. He returned to Chicago in 1919.

In 1921 Millikan left the University of Chicago to become director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. There he undertook a major study of the radiation that the physicist Victor Hess had detected coming from outer space. Millikan proved that this radiation is indeed of extraterrestrial origin, and he named it “cosmic rays.” As chairman of the executive council of Caltech from 1921 until his retirement in 1945, Millikan turned that school into one of the leading research institutions in the United States.