Millikan, Robert Andrews 1868-1953
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

He was born in Illinois, and studied at Oberlin College and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in 1895. After working at the universities of Berlin and G�ttingen, he became Albert Michelson's assistant at the University of Chicago, where he was appointed professor in 1910. In 1921 he moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he established the experimental physics laboratory. At Chicago he refined J J Thomson's oil drop technique, and was able to show that the charge on each droplet was always a multiple of the same basic unit - the charge on the electron - which he measured very precisely. In studies of the photoelectric effect he confirmed Albert Einstein's theoretical equations and gave an accurate value for Planck's constant. For all these achievements he was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize for physics. He also investigated cosmic rays, a term that he coined in 1925.

Bibliography: Robert H Kargon, The Rise of Robert Millikan: Portrait of a Life in American Science (1982)