American physicist born in Morrison, Illinois, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (1923) for his studies on the measurement of the charge of the electron and on the photoelectric effect. The second son of Reverend Silas Franklin Millikan and Mary Jane Andrews, he was educated at Maquoketa High School in Iowa. After briefly working as a free lander reporter, he entered Oberlin College, Ohio (1886). Initially she was interested in Greek and mathematics, but after her graduation (1891) she started teaching and took a liking to physics.
After earning his mastership in physics (1893), he was named a Fellow in Physics at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. (1895) for his conclusions on the polarization of light emitted by incandescent surfaces. He spent a year in Germany (1895-1896), improving at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen. Invited by A. THE. Michelson returned to America to be an assistant at the newly founded Ryerson Laboratory at the University of Chicago (1896), where he developed his unprecedented experiment in which he measured the charge on the electron and created the famous oil drop test (1911).
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Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago (1896-1921), Director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics and President of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. (1921-1945), became known worldwide for isolating the electron and for his research with rays cosmic, luminous properties of the radiation of atoms, Brownian motion and spectrum ultraviolet. Married (1902) to Greta Erwin Blanchard, the couple had three children: Clark Blanchard, Glenn Allen and Max Franklin. He was an honorary doctor at 25 universities, received many other honors and died in San Marino, California.
Figure copied from the CENTER FOR HISTORY OF PHYSYCS / AIP website:
http://www.aip.org/
Source: Biographies - Academic Unit of Civil Engineering / UFCG
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SCHOOL, Team Brazil. "Robert Alexander Watson"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/biografia/robert-alexander.htm. Accessed on June 29, 2021.
