page_title: Robert Andrews Millikan
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Andrews Millikan / Biography / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Robert A. Millikan in 1954
context_page_description: Robert Andrews Millikan was an American experimental physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.
  Millikan graduated from Oberlin College in 1891 and obtained his doctorate at Columbia University in 1895. In 1896 he became an assistant at the University of Chicago, where he became a full professor in 1910. In 1909 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 1910 with his famous oil-drop experiment in which he replaced water with oil.
  In 1914 Millikan took up with similar skill the experimental verification of the equation introduced by Albert Einstein in 1905 to describe the photoelectric effect. He used this same research to obtain an accurate value of Planck’s constant.
context_section_description: Millikan died of a heart attack at his home in San Marino, California in 1953 at age 85, and was interred in the "Court of Honor" at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
  Millikan Middle School (formerly Millikan Junior High School) in the suburban Los Angeles neighborhood of Sherman Oaks is named in his honor, as is Robert A. Millikan High School in Long Beach, California.  The Millikan Library, the tallest building on the Caltech campus is also named after him. Additionally, a major street through the Tektronix campus in Portland, Oregon, is named after him, with the Millikan Way (MAX station), a station on Portland, Oregon's MAX Blue Line named after the street.  One of four suites at the Athenaeum Hotel on the Caltech campus is named after him; Room #50, The Millikan Suite.
  On January 26, 1982, he was honored by the United States Postal Service with a 37¢ Great Americans series (1980–2000) postage stamp.
caption: Robert A. Millikan circa 1953
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