Millikan scientist biography chemistry

American physicist (–)

This article is about the Nobel laureate physicist. For Nobel laureate in chemistry, see Robert S. Mulliken.

Robert Andrews Millikan (March 22, – December 19, ) was an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in for the measurement of the elementary charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.

Millikan graduated from Oberlin College in and obtained his doctorate at Columbia University in In he became an assistant at the University of Chicago, where he became a full professor in In 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 with his oil-drop experiment in which he repla