Robert Andrews Millikan

Millikan’s Atomic Model

How he changed the atomic model Millikan changed the atomic model by giving scientist more time to explore the model, before a scientist named Wilson his model was with a water droplet and it didn’t stay up that long with the electric field so Millikan found a new way by using an oil droplet and it stayed up for hours and the water only stayed up for seconds. It works by putting the oil droplet in between an electric field and gravity.

Summarizing Millikan’s Oil-Drop Method The experiment consisted of tiny charged droplets between two horizontal metal electrodes. First the velocity of the of the droplets were measured. Voltage was applied to the electrodes to induce an electric field. Drops were suspended in mechanical equilibrium. Now Millikan can figure out the charge of the oil droplets. The charges were small integers multiples of a certain base value. He proposed that this was the negative of the charge of a single electron.

The experiment that led to a change in previous atom models Robert A. Millikan led to a change in the previous model of an atom by balancing charged oil drops between an electric field and gravity, Millikan proved that the electron was a fundamental particle with a fundamental charge.