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...