This portrait of Noyes, Millikan,
and Hale—Caltech's Triumvirate—hangs in
the dining room of the Institute's Athenaeum. Courtesy
of The Caltech Institute Archives. Click
here for additional photos.
by Daniel J. Kevles
Stanley Woodward Professor of History,
Yale University.
Abridged from Scientific
American, 1979.
Robert
A. Millikan was the most famous American scientist of
his day. In 1923 he became the second American (A. A.
Michelson had been the first, in 1907) to win the Nobel
prize in physics. Millikan is best known to physicists
for measuring the charge of the electron with his oil-drop
experiment; in the span of a remarkably productive career
he also made significant contributions to the study of
the photoelectric effect, hot-spark spectra and, above
all, cosmic rays. He was more than a research scientist;
between the wars he headed the new California Institute
of Technology, advised industrial corporations and philanthropic
foundations and played a key part in the development of
Federal policy for academic science.
The son of a Congregational minister and the former dean
of women of a small college, Millikan was born in 1868
in Illinois and was raised from the 1870's in Maquoketa,
Iowa (population 3,000). He showed no particular scientific
inclinations, and neither his family or school nor the
agrarian environment stimulated him to move in a technical
direction. At Oberlin College (where his mother had gone
before him) he pursued a standard classical curriculum;
his move toward physics came when his professor of Greek,
impressed with Millikan's abilities, invited him to teach
an introductory physics course in the preparatory school
run by the college. (When Millikan protested that he knew
nothing about the subject, the professor replied, "Anyone
who can do well in my Greek can teach physics.")
After graduation Millikan stayed at Oberlin to teach in
the preparatory department for two more years and then
went on to Columbia University, where he was the only
graduate student in physics. One summer he worked under
Michelson at the University of Chicago. Having earned
his doctorate in physics at Columbia, Millikan spent a
postdoctoral year in Europe, where his teachers included
Max Planck, Walther Nernst and Henri Poincare; he acquired
what was on the whole a better than average training for
an aspiring American physicist at the turn of the century.
Joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1896, Millikan
poured his considerable energies into developing the physics
curriculum. At that time American students in both high
school and college relied on foreign textbooks. Millikan
wrote or co-authored a variety of books and laboratory
manuals that became classroom standards. (A First Course
in Physics, written with Henry G. Gale, sold more than
1.6 million copies between 1906 and 1952.)
World War I interrupted Millikan's research career. By
now one of the nation's leading physicists, he was increasingly
active in the professional affairs of his discipline and
in the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a pioneer
in developing links between industry and academic physics:
he became a consultant to the research department of Western
Electric, primarily to advise the company on vacuum-tube
problems, and he pointed a number of his students toward
careers in industry. Early in 1917, to help mobilize science
for defense, Millikan went to Washington as a vice-chairman
and the director of research of the newly established
National Research Council in the National Academy of Sciences.
Like many scientists engaged in defense research during
World War I, Millikan soon entered the armed services.
As a lieutenant colonel in the Army Signal Corps, he directed
work in meteorology, aeronautical instruments and communications,
and in his National Research Council capacity, he played
an important role in initiating and advancing a major
project to develop devices for the detection of submarines.
Millikan's success in the wartime mobilization was no
mean achievement. The National Research Council, a private
organization like its parent the National Academy, had
no Federal appropriation; it had limited private resources
and no authority in governmental affairs. During the war,
as a friend recalled, Millikan learned how to "sell
science" to a wide variety of people, military and
civilian alike.
Millikan's work in the wartime National Research Council
particularly impressed the astrophysicist George Ellery
Hale and the physical chemist Arthur A. Noyes, who were
inaugurating a venture in education and research in southern
California. In 1921, at their urging, Millikan moved to
Pasadena to become head of the new and munificently financed
Cal Tech and director of its physics laboratory. With
a knack for making wealthy southern Californians think
it a privilege to be invited to contribute to the institute,
he enlarged the Cal Tech endowement and physical plant.
Millikan's traits, fused with Hale's vision, Noyes's wisdom
and all that money, made Cal Tech virtually an overnight
success.
Between the wars Millikan was an influential member of
the National Academy and of the National Research Council
and its fellowship board, which he helped to administer
so as to improve the quality of American physics, particularly
in theoretical studies. During World War II he turned
over an increasing fraction of his administrative responsibilities
at Cal Tech to younger staff members who were running
various defense projects. Relinquishing his chief executive's
position to Lee A. DuBridge in 1946, Millikan remained
at the institute until his death in 1953. Throughout the
Cal Tech years, in spite of his administrative commitments,
he taught a course in atomic physics and took a keen interest
in graduate students. He also maintained an active research
program almost to the end.
Unitarian
Note
Robert
A. Millikan served as president of the congregation now
known as the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church
of Pasadena. He performed one of science's most beautiful
experiments recently described as of comparable worth
to Galileo's experiment on falling objects. Millikan's
memorable oil-drop experiment is described by George Johnson
in the New York Times Science section, September
24, 2002.
Dr. Kevles notes Millikan's salience as a reconciler of
science and religion in the 20s, the era of the Scopes
trial regarding evolution, stating: "Millikan spoke
out strongly for religion, for moral and spiritual values
and for a faith tempered by the open-minded tolerance
of the scientific spirit."
