The Oil Drop Experiment Finally Updated
In 1910, Robert Millikan of the University of Chicago announced that he and Harvey Fletcher had developed a successful means of isolating and measuring the charge of an electron. This became known as “the oil drop experiment” and won Millikan a Nobel prize in Physics in 1923.
The May 2007 issue of Physics Today has an article written by Michael Fletcher Perry, the great grandson of Harvey Fletcher. It is entitled “Remembering the Oil Drop Experiment.”
In 1910, Robert Millikan of the University of Chicago announced that he and Harvey Fletcher had developed a successful means of isolating and measuring
the charge of an electron. This became known as “the oil drop experiment” and won Millikan a Nobel prize in Physics in 1923.
Millikan, who was Fletcher’s thesis adviser for his Ph.D. arranged for himself to be the sole author of the paper by allowing Fletcher to use another jointly written paper for his Ph.D. thesis. After Fletcher’s death in 1981, his heirs found among his uncirculated papers, the true story of what happened.
Later, Dr. Sidney Bertram told us of a Cal Tech student who had uniquely expressed his ire at Millikan’s take-over of others’ work. Someone had written “JESUS SAVES” on a construction sign. Someone else added, “BUT MILLIKAN GETS THE CREDIT.” (See photo)
In fairness, it was Millikan who arranged for Fletcher to eventually go to Bell Telephone Laboratories where he became, to quote Dr. Jont Allen, “The singular intellectual force in the development of present day communications, acoustics and telephony”.
Wente and Thuras, Steinberg and Snow, and a multitude of other immortal names in audio and acoustics came to maturity under Fletcher’s guidance. No worker under him or with him ever had his work appropriated by Fletcher. When Fletcher’s name appeared jointly on a paper with a fellow worker, it was a certainty that Fletcher had done 99.9% of the work.
I had the privilege of being one of the hosts for Fletcher at an AES Convention for “An Afternoon with…” Fletcher was then in his 90s when he stopped over in Los Angeles to attend an AES session in his honor. (Fletcher was on his way to Hawaii for his second honeymoon. Fletcher and Carl Eyring had married sisters and Erying had at this point passed away as had Fletcher’s wife, Lorena. Fletcher then married the surviving sister.)
One early Syn-Aud-Con grad in a Boston seminar was riding home after the seminar on a train or bus. He began to talk to the young lady sitting next to him, telling her why he was in Boston. The young lady turned out to be Fletcher’s great granddaughter and they spent the trip with him relating to her what he had learned in the seminar about her grandfather.
Fletcher was living proof of the old adage, “It’s better to be stolen from than to have to steal.”