The Weight of a Number: Robert Millikan and the Charge of Scientific Integrity

In 1913, Robert Millikan published his oil drop experiment, the first accurate measurement of a single electron’s charge. The work earned him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics. His result was printed in every textbook, and his method became a standard example of precise experimental technique.

But the standard story conceals a problem. Millikan’s private laboratory notebooks reveal that he selectively reported his data, and that a systematic error in one of his inputs made his celebrated result too low. The shadow of his authority kept the scientific community anchored to that flawed number for a generation.

The Experiment and the Seeds of Error

The strength of Millikan’s experiment was its simplicity. By observing tiny, electrically charged oil droplets suspended in an electric field, he demonstrated that the charge on any droplet was always a whole number multiple of a fundamental value, e, the elementary charge of a single electron.

Robert Millikan: American physicist (1868–1953) (Source: Wikipedia)

The controversy centers on a systematic error in one of Millikan’s inputs: the accepted value for the viscosity of air was incorrect, which made his final, celebrated result for e about 0.6% too low. Compounding this, his private notebooks reveal that he published only about one-third of his measured droplets in his landmark 1913 paper, excluding the rest as “poor” or “wrong”1. This selective reporting did not cause the 0.6% bias, but it made his results appear more precise than they were, reinforcing confidence in a number that was already off.

The Slow Crawl to the Truth

Millikan’s immense prestige established his value for the electron’s charge as scientific dogma. For nearly two decades, the global scientific community was anchored to his flawed number. As the data shows, new measurements, including those using entirely different methods like X-ray diffraction, produced results that hovered right around Millikan’s value of 1.59 × 10−19 C.

Table 1: Historical Measurements of the Elementary Charge (e)

Data compiled from sources listed and adapted from Christian Hill .

Figure 1: Historical measurements of the elementary charge showing the gradual convergence toward the modern accepted value. The horizontal dashed line represents the current CODATA 2022 value. Hover over data points for details.

The scientific community remained anchored to Millikan’s value for over a decade. By the early 1930s, however, a troubling discrepancy had emerged: values for the electron’s charge derived from X-ray diffraction experiments were consistently higher than those from oil drop experiments. This forced physicists to question whether the X-ray method was flawed or if a systematic error was hiding within the oil drop calculations.

The prime suspect became the accepted value for the viscosity of air, a key parameter in Millikan’s equations. The puzzle began to unravel in the mid-1930s when several researchers conducted new, precise measurements of this property. A crucial piece of evidence came from G. Kellström in 1936, who reported a viscosity value significantly higher than the one Millikan had used. This discovery provided a physical explanation for the discrepancy. When influential reviewers like Raymond T. Birge applied this corrected viscosity value to the older oil drop data, they found that the re-calculated results now agreed with the higher values from the X-ray experiments. The dam had broken. With a clear reason to distrust the old constant, the community could finally embrace the higher values, leading to the rapid convergence on a more accurate number after 1936.

In a now famous 1974 commencement address at Caltech, Richard Feynman perfectly diagnosed this phenomenon:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves… It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that… until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong… When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard.

American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) (Source: Wikipedia)

A Legacy of Truth and Caution

Millikan’s story is not one of simple fraud. He was a brilliant experimentalist who made a genuine breakthrough. His failing was confirmation bias, a trap that awaits any researcher. The legacy of the oil drop experiment is twofold. It was an important experiment that first pinned down one of nature’s fundamental constants. But it also serves as a cautionary tale: even a Nobel laureate, armed with the best equipment of his era, produced a biased result because he could not resist filtering the data to match his expectations. Scientific integrity demands we report all the data, especially the results that seem to tell us we are wrong.



References

  1. Millikan, R. A. On the Elementary Electrical Charge and the Avogadro Constant. Phys. Rev. 1913, 2, (doi).
  2. Millikan, R. A. A New Determination of e, N, and Related Constants. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 1917, 34, (doi).
  3. Wadlund, A. P. R. Absolute X-Ray Wave-Length Measurements. Phys. Rev. 1928, 32, (doi).
  4. Birge, R. T. Probable Values of the General Physical Constants. Rev. Mod. Phys. 1929, 1, (doi).
  5. Bäcklin, E. Eddington’s Hypothesis and the Electronic Charge. Nature 1929, 123, (link).
  6. Bearden, J. A. Absolute Wave-Lengths of the Copper and Chromium K-Series. Phys. Rev. 1931, 37, (doi).
  7. Bäcklin, E. The X-Ray Crystal Scale, the Absolute Scale and the Electronic Charge. Nature 1935, 135, (link).
  8. Bearden, J. A. The Measurement of X-Ray Wavelengths by Large Ruled Gratings. Phys. Rev. 1935, 48, (doi).
  9. Söderman, M. Absolute value of the X-Unit. Nature 1935, 135, (link).
  10. Kellström, G. Viscosity of Air and the Electronic Charge. Phys. Rev. 1936, 50, (doi).
  11. Bäcklin, E.; Flemberg, H. The Oil-Drop Method and the Electronic Charge. Nature 1936, 137, (link).
  12. Birge, R. T. Interrelationships of e, h/e and e/m. Nature 1936, 137, (doi).
  13. Birge, R. T. On the Values of Fundamental Atomic Constants. Phys. Rev. 1937, 52, (doi).
  14. Robinson, H. R. The charge of the electron. Rep. Prog. Phys. 1937, 4, (doi).
  15. Dunnington, F. G. The Atomic Constants A Revaluation and an Analysis of the Discrepancy. Rev. Mod. Phys. 1939, 11, (doi).
  16. DuMond, J. W. M.; Cohen, E. R. Least-Squares Adjusted Values of the Atomic Constants as of December, 1950. Phys. Rev. 1951, 82, (doi).
  17. Mohr, P. J.; Newell, D. B.; Taylor, B.; Tiesinga, E. CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants: 2022 J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data 2025, 54, 033105, (doi).
  18. Feynman, R. P. Cargo Cult Science. Caltech commencement address, 1974. Reprinted in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!; W. W. Norton: New York, 1985.

References

(1)
Holton, G. Subelectrons, Presuppositions, and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 1978, 9, 161–224. https://doi.org/10.2307/27757378.