Robert Andrews Millikan in 1891 when he graduated Oberlin.
Career
Gallery of Robert Millikan
1924
1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States
Millikan receives a check for over $40,000 for winning the Nobel Prize.
Gallery of Robert Millikan
1925
United States
Portrait of American Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, early to mid 20th century.
Gallery of Robert Millikan
1928
Berlin, Germany
Scientists visiting Max Laue in Berlin in 1928. From left: Walther Nernst, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Robert Andrews Millikan, Max Laue.
Gallery of Robert Millikan
1930
1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States
Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, of the California Institute of Technology, whose discovery of a hitherto unknown ray, has startled the scientific world. Dr. Milliken is shown working in his laboratory. Around 1930.
Gallery of Robert Millikan
1931
1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States
First row from the left: Albert A. Michelson, Albert Einstein and Robert A. Millikan at Caltech in 1931.
Gallery of Robert Millikan
1932
1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States
Robert A. Millikan and Albert Einstein at the California Institute of Technology.
Gallery of Robert Millikan
1933
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Ales Hrdlicka, left, of the Smithsonian Institute, and Robert Andrews Millikan of the California Institution of Technology of Pasadena, California, at the general meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Achievements
Membership
French Academy of Sciences
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Pontifical Academy of Sciences
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Russian Academy of Sciences
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
American Physical Society
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the American Physical Society.
National Academy of Sciences
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Awards
Nobel Prize in Physics
1924
1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States
Millikan receives a check for over $40,000 for winning the Nobel Prize.
1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States
Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, of the California Institute of Technology, whose discovery of a hitherto unknown ray, has startled the scientific world. Dr. Milliken is shown working in his laboratory. Around 1930.
Ales Hrdlicka, left, of the Smithsonian Institute, and Robert Andrews Millikan of the California Institution of Technology of Pasadena, California, at the general meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Robert Andrews Millikan was an American physicist and educator. He was also the 1st President of California Institute of Technology.
Background
Robert Andrews Millikan was born on March 22, 1868, in Morrison, Illinois. He was the son of Silas Franklin Millikan, a Congregational minister, and Mary Jane Andrews Millikan, who had been dean of Olivet College. When he was five years old, the family moved to McGregor, Iowa, a typical American small town on the banks of the Mississippi, where Millikan participated in the river life so vividly described by his hero, Mark Twain.
Education
Robert Andrews Millikan studied at Maquoketa Community High School. In 1886, he entered Oberlin College, where he studied mathematics and Greek. He also took a twelve-week course in physics, which, he later said, was "a complete loss." The following year, however, his Greek professor asked him to teach a course in physics in the preparatory department. When he said that he knew nothing about it, he was assured that "anyone who can do well in Greek can teach physics. " Thus began his interest in the subject that occupied his attention for the rest of his life. After Millikan graduated from Oberlin in 1891, he remained as a tutor in physics and, since he was a good athlete, also served as acting director of the gymnasium. The money he earned enabled him to do graduate work and to help his two younger brothers and three younger sisters through college; all eventually graduated from Oberlin. Millikan earned the master's degree from Oberlin in 1893, then attended Columbia University, from which he received the Doctor in physics in 1895. His professor, the physicist and inventor Michael I. Pupin, advised him to study in Europe because advanced physics education in the United States was not of high quality at the time. Pupin loaned him $300 to help finance this venture. He heard Poincaré lecture at Paris, took a course from Planck at Berlin, and did research with Nernst at Göttingen.
Millikan spent most of 1896 at the University of Berlin. This was a critical time in the history of modern physics, shortly after Heinrich Hertz's discovery of electromagnetic waves (radio waves) and coincident with Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X rays and Antoine Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity. Also, the nature of cathode rays, the subject of lively discussion, was settled in 1897 by J. J. Thomson's proof that they were electrons. Twentieth-century physics was born of these discoveries; Millikan was present at the birth and became acquainted with those whose discoveries made it possible. In the fall of 1896, Millikan accepted an assistantship in physics at the new University of Chicago and immediately undertook the task of organizing the curriculum and writing textbooks to replace the English translations of French texts then in wide use. In 1910 he became a full professor. While at Chicago, Millikan began his lifelong personal and scientific friendship with A. A. Michelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Michelson was noted for his "ether-drift" experiment, which laid the foundation for Einstein's theory of relativity. Despite his heavy teaching schedule, Millikan found time to begin his research career. He studied both the production of "hot sparks" by applying a high voltage between two electrodes in a high vacuum and the photoelectric effect the emission of electrons from a metal surface under the action of ultraviolet light. In both cases, he was pessimistic about the worth of his results, but the techniques he developed were used with brilliant success many years later. Millikan's first "serious" research project was begun in 1906, when he decided that the most important problem in modern physics was to obtain an accurate measurement of the charge on the electron and to determine whether this charge is, in fact, the basic unit of all electrical charges. Previous attempts to measure it had given widely varying results, leading some to believe that it is not the same for all electrons. Millikan believed that the range of results was caused by faulty experimental technique. In 1909, he devised the "oil-drop experiment, " in which he measured the rate of rise or fall of individual charged droplets of oil when an electric field was applied and when it was not. He then determined the charge on each droplet. Millikan found that every measured charge was a whole-number multiple of a basic unit of charge the charge on a single electron which he could now measure with high precision. He published the value he obtained in 1913.
Millikan next sought to test more precisely the quantum theory of radiation that had been suggested by Max Planck in 1900 and boldly extended by Albert Einstein in 1905. Einstein's photoelectric equation predicted a linear relation between the frequency of the light falling on a metal plate and the maximum energy of the electrons ejected. This relation was at variance with the wave theory of light, expounded earlier by James Clerk Maxwell. Einstein's equation had been only roughly tested, with not entirely convincing results.
In 1917, Millikan was forty-nine, an age at which many scientists have completed their most important work. That year he was asked by his old friend George Ellery Hale, then director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California, to join him in Washington, D. C., to mobilize American scientists for war work. World War I was reaching a critical stage for the Allies and the United States was about to become involved. Hale had been appointed a chairman of the newly organized National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, and he appointed Millikan director of research and executive officer. Among his duties was supervision of the work of many scientists and engineers from universities and industry. Millikan also worked in his area of special interest antisubmarine warfare. By the middle of 1917 the German submarine menace had brought England to the verge of starvation and possible surrender. Millikan organized a laboratory in New London, Connecticut, where a brilliant group of physicists developed and installed on submarine chasers an underwater listening device, originally invented by Max Mason. Some of the ships equipped with this mechanism began operating in the English Channel in May 1918, and they soon helped to eliminate sinkings by submarines in that vital area. Millikan achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps. As the war was coming to an end, he and Hale supervised the conversion of the National Research Council into a permanent organization. Millikan declined the invitation to remain in Washington as its full-time chairman, but before leaving he persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to finance a program of National Research Council post-doctoral fellowships. During the ensuing twenty years, hundreds of young American scientists profited from these grants by spending one or two years in full-time research at American or, later, European universities. In 1950 Millikan stated, in his Autobiography, that this fellowship program "has been the most vital influence in the development of the United States into a country whose scientific output is now comparable to that of other leading scientific countries."
In November 1918, Millikan returned to the University of Chicago. For a year, however, he continued to spend a good deal of time in Washington fulfilling his duties as a member of the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences. His stay at Chicago was short-lived, however. As early as 1917, Millikan had been persuaded by Hale to spend some time in Pasadena at Throop College of Technology, which Hale, who was a trustee, and many others were trying to build into a first-class scientific center. In 1920, the trustees changed the name of the college to California Institute of Technology, and in 1921 they offered Millikan a new research laboratory and a $90, 000-a-year research fund (much more than he had at Chicago) if he would come to Pasadena to head "Caltech" and direct its physics laboratory. For the next thirty-four years, Millikan was the key figure in the development of Caltech. Throop College in 1920 was a small but highly regarded undergraduate school of engineering. Hale, together with Albert A. Noyes, professor of chemistry, had persuaded a group of enthusiastic trustees that under Millikan's leadership it could develop into a center of education and research comparable with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which Hale himself had attended.
As the key figure in the development of Caltech, Millikan saw that research laboratories could serve the rapidly expanding needs of southern California business and industry in many ways. He initiated high-voltage engineering research that made it possible to construct power lines that would bring electricity from the Sierras and Hoover Dam. Pumps were developed in the hydraulics laboratory to bring water to Los Angeles from the distant Colorado River. In the aeronautical laboratories, aircraft designs were developed and tested, and engineers trained, to help the California aircraft industry achieve its dominant position. Millikan established a pioneering laboratory to study earthquakes. Some of the puzzling results were resolved only by the introduction in 1925 of the important concept of the "spinning electron" by the Dutch physicists Samuel A. Goudsmit and George E. Uhlenbeck. Through these and many other research projects, the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics at Caltech became a mecca for physicists from all over the world, including Einstein, Michelson, Arnold Sommerfeld, Paul Ehrenfest, Niels Bohr, and H. A. Lorentz. Despite his strenuous schedule, Millikan found time to search the United States and Europe for first-rate scholars to provide leadership for the departments and divisions of Caltech. By the late 1930's Caltech was generally regarded as a center of science and engineering second in quality to none in the nation. Millikan also built a strong division of humanities to ensure that all students received a liberal education. Millikan's own strong interest in history, philosophy, religion, and public and international affairs is revealed in many of his writings and speeches. Beginning in 1940, Caltech was converted almost entirely from civilian to military work. Three huge research projects in jet propulsion, in artillery rockets, and in antisubmarine warfare were extremely productive. Many Caltech faculty members played leading roles in other wartime laboratories throughout the country. A large navy officer-training program also was conducted. Despite advancing age, Millikan remained head of Caltech, following its work closely although he relinquished many administrative duties to others. In 1945, as Caltech began returning to civilian activities, he retired at the age of seventy-seven. He died in San Marino, California.
Millikan was born to a clergyman of Scottish descent. Millikan was devoutly religious and wrote considerably about the importance of faith and religion in his autobiography. Seeger wrote that Millikan was probably a member of the Congregational Church. When Robert E. Brown, his brother-in-law, and a Congregationalist minister, called on him to organize the scientific community in support of evolution, Millikan drew up a statement, which Noyes revised, that was signed by leading scientists, intellectuals, and community leaders including the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. He attended the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church of Pasadena where Robert had served on the church board and as congregation president.
Politics
The depression years and Roosevelt's "New Deal" were hard on Millikan, a conservative Republican and a believer in self-sufficiency. He accepted an appointment to the president's Science Advisory Board but was not in favor of federal funding for university research. He was an early supporter of military aid for the allies and encouraged military research at Caltech. He continued to lead the school during World War II and was closely engaged with the work at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Retiring in 1946, he continuing to work in a campus office, often speaking in public on the relationship between science and religion, arguing against federal aid to education, and opposing the establishment of the National Science Foundation.
Views
Despite his heavy administrative burdens, Millikan pursued his own research in physics and guided the research of scores of graduate students and research fellows. The first research project he undertook at Caltech was the study of the ionization of air at high altitudes, which he and others thought might be caused by radiation reaching the earth from outer space. He soon confirmed his theory, and in 1925 named these radiations "cosmic rays. " His study of the enormously energetic and penetrating cosmic rays opened a new era in high-energy physics. They contained, or produced, particles never before observed. Two such particles, the positron, and the meson were discovered in Millikan's laboratory by one of his students, Carl D. Anderson, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1936. Another line of research initiated by Millikan at Caltech was the study of the far-ultraviolet spectra of atoms. Using the vacuum hot-spark technique, he and Ira S. Bowen pushed the known limit of the ultraviolet spectrum to much shorter wavelengths than had previously been attained. Also, in his hot sparks, many atoms were stripped of their outer electrons and their spectra revealed hitherto unobserved features.
Quotations:
"This much I can say with definiteness - namely, that there is no scientific basis for the denial of religion - nor is there in my judgment any excuse for a conflict between science and religion, for their fields are entirely different. Men who know very little of science and men who know very little of religion do indeed get to quarreling, and the onlookers imagine that there is a conflict between science and religion, whereas the conflict is only between two different species of ignorance."
"Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment."
"There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom."
"Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both."
"Fullness of knowledge always and necessarily means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance, and that is always conducive to both humility and reverence."
"The purpose of science is to develop, without prejudice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts, the laws, and the processes of nature. The even more important task of religion, on the other hand, is to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind."
"Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward."
"My idea of an educated person is one who can converse on one subject for more than two minutes."
"To me it is unthinkable that a real atheist could be a scientist."
"The pathetic thing about it is that many scientists are trying to prove the doctrine of evolution, which no science can do."
"Two erroneous impressions . .. seem to be current among certain groups of uninformed persons. The first is that religion today stands for mediaeval theology; the second that science is materialistic and irreligious."
"I consider an intimate knowledge of the Bible an indispensable quality of a well educated man."
"Cultivate the habit of attention and try to gain opportunities to hear wise men and women talk. Indifference and inattention are the two most dangerous monsters that you ever meet. Interest and attention will insure to you an education."
"Interest and attention will insure to you an education."
"Indeed, nothing more beautifully simplifying has ever happened in the history of science than the whole series of discoveries culminating about 1914 which finally brought practically universal acceptance to the theory that the material world contains but two fundamental entities, namely, positive and negative electrons, exactly alike in charge, but differing widely in mass, the positive electron-now usually called a proton-being 1850 times heavier than the negative, now usually called simply the electron."
"Three ideas stand out above all others in the influence they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race: The idea of the Golden Rule; the idea of natural law; the idea of age-long growth or evolution."
"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo. Nature has introduced a few fool-proof devices into the great majority of elements that constitute the bulk of the world, and they have no energy to give up in the process of disintegration."
Membership
Robert Andrews Millikan was a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.
French Academy of Sciences
,
France
Pontifical Academy of Sciences
,
Vatican
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Russian Academy of Sciences
,
Russia
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
,
Germany
American Association for the Advancement of Science
,
United States
American Physical Society
,
United States
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
Personality
Millikan quickly won the respect and admiration of the trustees and faculty, as well as many business and industrial leaders in southern California. He already had extensive contacts with business and foundation executives in the East. He used these contacts to raise funds for buildings, endowment, and research. Millikan's genius, however, lay in attracting outstanding scholars to the faculty and in encouraging them. To his intense gratification, many National Research Council fellows elected to work at Caltech, and a number joined the staff. Millikan and the trustees kept the school small and select. In 1940, there were only about 300 graduate students and 600 undergraduates, all of the exceptional ability. Six former students had received Nobel prizes as of 1975, as had seven faculty members.
Millikan spent most of his waking hours in his beloved laboratory, however, continuing, for a time, some of his cosmic-ray research. He was a genial, gentle, and much-beloved human being. His scientific publications, many of outstanding importance, spanned fifty-four years (1895 - 1949).
Quotes from others about the person
"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that." - Richard Phillips Feynman, an American theoretical physicist in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Interests
Writers
Mark Twain
Connections
In 1902, Millikan married Greta Ervin Blanchard, a recent graduate of the University of Chicago, where she had majored in Greek; they had three sons, all of whom became well-known scholars.