Abstract
In September 1886 a teacher wrote on a Maquoketa High School report card: “Robert Millikan gained an excellent standing for good deportment, faithful application to duty and exceptionally high grade of scholarship.”1 As time soon told, this student did not disappoint. Later in life, he would, for the first time in history, accurately measure the charge on an electron, verify Einstein’s theoretical ideas about the nature of light and contribute enormously to our understanding of those mysterious visitors from space—cosmic rays. Beyond all of this, he would midwife the growth of the California Institute of Technology from its beginnings as the small and undistinguished “Throop” institute to the world-class institution it is today.
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Endnotes
R. A. Millikan, “Juvenalia,” Robert A. Millikan Papers, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.
Robert Millikan, The Autobiography of Robert Millikan (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1950), p. 37.
1964 interview with Linus Pauling, by John Heilbron.
Robert Millikan, The Autobiography of Robert Milikan (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1950), p. 62.
Mitchell Wilson, American Science and Invention (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1954), p. 334.
John L. Michel, “The Chicago Connection: Michelson and Millikan, 1894–1921” in The Michelson Era in American Science: 1870–1930 (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1988), p. 167.
James Trefil, From Atoms to Quarks (Scribner’s, New York, 1980), p. 22.
Robert Millikan, The Autobiography of Robert Millikan (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1950), p. 100.
J. L. Michel, “The Chicago Connection: Michelson and Millikan, 1894–1921” in The Michelson Era in American Science: 1870–1930 (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1988).
R. A. Millikan, “Quantum Relations in Photo-electric Phenomena,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1916, 2:78.
Robert H. Kargon, The Rise of Robert Millikan (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), p. 72, where Kargon discusses Stuewer’s comments on this claim.
Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978), p. 113.
Joseph Boyce to John Cockcroft, personal letter of 8 January, in the Sir John Cockcroft Papers, Churchill College Library, Cambridge, England.
Charles Weiner, “1932—Moving into New Physics,” Physics Today, May 1972.
R. A. Milikan, “Science and Life,” 1924, p. 68, Robert A. Millikan Papers, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
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© 1993 Anthony Serafini
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Serafini, A. (1993). R. A. Millikan and the Maturity of American Science. In: Legends in Their Own Time. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6090-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6090-0_5
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