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MILLIKAN, ROBERT A. 1868-1953

PHYSICIST AND ADMINISTRATOR

Self-Starter

Born in 1868 in Morrison? Illinois, to a preacher and a former dean of a Michigan college, Robert A. Millikan spent his childhood in Iowa. Self-taught in physics while at Oberlin College, he graduated in 1893 with a master's degree and enrolled at Columbia University the same year as its sole graduate student in physics. There he studied with Michael Pupin, another self-starter, who had risen from immigrant status to that of respected inventor. Following the completion of his Ph.D. in 1895, Millikan was invited to the University of Chicago to assist Albert Michelson, whom he knew from having taught a course for him the preceding year. Because Michelson disliked lecturing, Millikan assumed heavy teaching loads yet found the time to initiate his own program of research, achieving notice for his studies of electric charges and the photoelectric effect. While at Chicago he wrote several texts that were eventually used by generations of science students. He also became a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and later assumed the research directorship of the National Research Council (NRC), formed in 1916 to mobilize America's talents for defense purposes. He later moved to the California Institute of Technology and received a Nobel Prize in physics in 1923 for his 1916 confirmation of Albert Einstein's 1905 theoretical predictions about quanta. Interestingly, he did not believe in quanta himself until several years later.

Building a New University

In 1919 Millikan moved to California as a visiting professor at the Throop College of Technology in Pasadena. His reputation as an administrator had preceded him, since after the war he successfully built a postdoctoral research program attached to the NRC for young Americans interested in scientific professions. Later, as chair of the Executive Council of Throop College, he was offered its presidency but declined it, asking instead that the name be changed to the California Institute of Technology, and he maintained an influential role as an administrator and promoter of science. Through his untiring devotion "Caltech" became as famous an abbreviation as MIT, and the quality of American science and scientific education increased substantially. Each year, for example, the California Institute of Technology would host a group of young NRC postdoctoral students so they could enjoy a stimulating place in which to present, compare, and develop their ideas.

The Controversies of Science

While he was busy teaching and administering at the California Institute of Technology, Millikan became embroiled in a debate with physicist A. H. Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. Millikan was convinced that such rays were composed of photons of the same nature as those in X rays and gamma radiation. Compton found "no way of reconciling the data with the [Millikan] hypothesis/' Millikan then claimed that the experiments carried out by Carl Anderson confirmed his views, while Compton maintained that the properties of earth's magnetism implied that such cosmic rays were composed of protons. Later experiments confirmed Compton's hypothesis.

Advocating the Sciences in the United States

By the time he retired in 1945 at age seventy-seven, Millikan had built the California Institute of Techno logy into a world-class institution, attracting a wide variety of scientists to lecture and research there. He never lost sight of the need to justify the uses of science to a skeptical public. To those who viewed it as a threat to religion and jobs, he stressed its positive role in strengthening the United States, thus contributing further to the maturation of the field; America needed science to assert its place in the world, and the sciences required an American setting of individual freedom of opinion to develop fully.