Robert Andrews Millikan, one of the most noted American physicist and scientists of his day. He was born in Morrison, Illinois, 22 March 1868,
the son of Reverend Silas Franklin Millikan and Mary Jane Andrews, whose ancestors had immigrated to the US from Old New England.
After he graduated at Maquoketa High School (Iowa), he worked as a court reporter before entering Oberlin College.
He studied at Oberlin College earning his master's degree in 1893. After leaving Oberlin, he enrolled at Columbia University. Millikan was the only physics graduate student and it was at Columbia that he earned his PhD degree.
Robert taught elementary physics for two years. He was appointed Fellow in Physics after receiving his mastership. Later he went on to receive his Ph.D. In 1923 he won the Nobel Prize for physics, for his study of the elementary electric charge and the photoelectric effect.
Millikan married in 1902 to Greta Blanchard. The couple had three sons: Clark Blanchard, Glen Allen and Max Franklin Millikan. Robert Andrews Millikan died in San Marino, California in December of 1953, after devoting his life to discoveries of science and the universe.
Robert's earliest major success was his "oil-drop" experiments, which measured an electrons charge and showed that the charge was a discrete constant rather than a statistical average. He later studied cosmic rays, which he names, physical and electric constants and X rays. He verifies Einstein’s photoelectric effect and made the first direct photoelectric determination of Planck’s constant. He also studies Brownian movement in gasses and put an end to the opposition against the kinetic and atomic theories of matter.
During World War I, he was vice chairman of the National Research Council where he played a major role in the development of meteorological and anti-submarine devices. His First Course in Physics, which was written by Henry Gale and him, was a standard textbook for many years. In 1921 he was appointed the director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He was also made chairman of the executive council of this institute, a post he held until he retired in 1945.
Robert Millikan died 19 December 1953 om Pasedena California.
