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Person

Robert Millikan

A man with white hair and a mustache, dressed in formal attire, stands against a dark background, exuding an air of scholarly respectability.

American experimental physicist best known for measuring the charge of the electron with his oil-drop apparatus. Between 1912 and 1916 he ran a meticulous campaign to disprove Einstein's photoelectric equation and instead confirmed it to within half a percent, yielding the most precise measurement of Planck's constant then available. He accepted the data but resisted the photon interpretation for another decade.

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