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+++Millikan's First Published Steps Towards the Oil Drop Experiment of 1913 Indirectly Measuring the Charge of a Single Electron (1910)+++ Robert Millikan. "A new modification of the cloud method of determining the elementary electrical charge and the most probable value of that charge," in The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine; London, Taylor & Francis, Volume XIX, Sixth Series, 1910, pp. 209-228, offered in the entire volume of 924pp, with 13 plates (some folding). Bound in black cloth with a red spine label, with heavily (professionally made) reinforced hinges. A big block of a book, very crisp, and in very nice sturdy shape. There is a remnant of a call card and a library name on a slip of paper half-attached to the front free endpaper, though this is the only mark I can find showing the history of ownership of the book. VERY GOOD copy. +++ "By 1909 Millikan was deeply involved in an attempt to measure the electronic charge. No one had yet obtained a reliable value for this fundamental constant, and some antiatomistic Continental physicists were insisting that it was not the constant of a unique particle but a statistical average of diverse electrical energies.[Millikan] launched his investigation with a technique developed by the British-born physicist H. A. Wilson; it consisted essentially of measuring, first, the rate at which a charged cloud of water vapor fell under the influence of gravity and then the modified rate under the counterforce of an electric field. Using Stokes s law of fall to determine the mass of the cloud, one could in principle compute the ionic charge. Millikan quickly recognized the numerous uncertainties in this technique, including the fact that evaporation at the surface of the cloud confused the measure of its rate of fall. Hoping to correct for this effect, he decided to study the evaporation history of the cloud while a strong electric Held held it in a stationary position. But when Millikan switched on the powerful field, the cloud disappeared; in its place were a few charged water drops moving slowly in response to the imposed electrical force. He quickly realized that it would be a good deal more accurate to determine the electronic charge by working with a single drop than with the swarm of particles in a cloud. Finding that he could make measurements on water drops for up to forty-five seconds before they evaporated. Millikan arrived at a value for e in 1909 which he considered accurate to within 2 percent. More important, he observed that the charge on any given water drop was always an integral multiple of an irreducible value. This result provided the most persuasive evidence yet that electrons were fundamental particles of identical charge and mass."-- Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 9, p 395. This was the first publication that would culminate in a final form in the of one of the most renowned scientific experiments of the 20th century, the oil-drop experiment of 1913 ("On the Elementary Electrical Charge and the Avogadro Constant", Phys. Rev. 2, 109 1 August 1913). "The first results came out in 1910, but the seminal work was a 1913 paper in the Physical Review. Millikan reported a value for the fundamental electric charge that was within half a percent of today s accepted value. The experiment helped earn Millikan a Nobel prize in 1923."--APS Physics Forums, "Focus: Landmarks Millikan Measures the Electron s Charge". Also in this volume are interesting papers by J.J. Thomson, J. Joly, C.V. Burton, Jean Perrin ("On the Charge of teh Electron"), A.S. Eve, H.A. Wilson ("On the relative Motion of the Earth and the Aether"), W.H. Eccles ("On Coherers"), Norman Campbell, Ernest Rutherford ("On the Action of Alpha Rays on Glass"), and numerous others, though to my eye the Millikan paper is the most significant.
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