Famous First Words #3: Charge of the Electron - Robert Millikan

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we have a gander at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

The charge of the electron was famously first measured by Robert Millikan, who got a Nobel prize and a library at Caltech named after him for his trouble. The problem was that Millikan flubbed the measurement. Eventually science figured it out and corrected his number -- that's what science does. Still, irregularities in his oil-drop data have been held up as proof that those of us in the rough trade are power-hungry freakozoids who simply can't be trusted.

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The scandal centered on 26 words that appeared in a follow-up article Millikan published: ...It is to be remarked, too, that this is not a selected group of drops, but represent all the drops experimented upon during 60 consecutive days...

Alas, examination of Millikan's lab notes demonstrated that the data were indeed a subset of measurements, selected, so the charges went, specifically to support Millikan's earlier results and cast doubt on those published by Viennese physicist and rival Felix Ehrenhaft. A greater controversy would not stir in the science world until claims of cold fusion 75 years later.

Millikan has since become somewhat of a poster child for the Old White Guy scientist, that fabled creature slinking around the smoky back rooms of academia, forever keeping wimmen and minorities away from the calculus using his political influence and powerful kicking talons. Caltech's David Goodstein took the opportunity of a Sigma Xi award ceremony to defend his institution's patron saint (pdf linky here). Goodstein contends that Millikan's data irregularities were much ado about nothing, as was his feud with Ehrenhest. Millikan faced some serious competition, but it came from J.J. Thompson not Felix Ehrenhest. Charges of sexism and anti-Semitism have root in some unfortunate comments made by Millikan; Goodstein suggests these may have been more a product of the age rather than a deep-seated character flaw.

Here is the opening of the paper that contains the infamous 26 words:

On the Elementary Electric charge and the Avagadro Constant
R. Millikan Phys. Rev. 2(2):109 (1913)

The experiments herewith reported were undertaken with the view of introducing certain improvements into the oil-drop method of determining e and N and thus obtaining a higher accuracy than had before been possible in the evaluation of these most fundamental constants.