Millikan, Robert A.

MILLIKAN

Posted By: Ken Wright (email)
Date: 10/20/2007 at 00:18:23

The
Autobiography
Of
Robert A. Millikan,
1950

1

Early Childhood and Education, or Midwest
Progressive Education in the Seventies

In the year 1872 in the little town of Morrison, Illinois, my two-year-old brother and I were playing in the dust underneath our front porch where our hens were wallowing. His toy was a large pewter spoon. Upon my refusal to eat the spoonful of dust which he offered me, he said if I would not eat it he would eat it himself. I can see him now, running to Mother and screaming with wide-open mouth full of dry dust. Thus early was I introduced to the experimental-project method in education.

The second scene is at the age of five, for it was then that I took my first lesson on the pitch and reflection of sound. As I lay in bed of a foggy morning in the small town of McGregor, Iowa, just opposite Prairie du Chien, whither the family had moved in March, 1873, I listened, not with fear but with some awe, to the reverberations from the bluffs, that there flank the great river, of the booming foghorn notes continuously sounding from the steamboats which at that time plied the Mississippi River. That was my first lesson in acoustics, and the weird effect of those deep, loud, bellowing sounds is with me still. Also, the thunder storms, with the accompanying lighting flashes, had in very early youth a strange fascination for me. Such displays are at their best in the upper Mississippi Valley. They stimulate the senses – sight, sound, and smell. My younger brother and I were fond of wrapping ourselves up in a blanket on our front porch and watching the spectacle. It never occurred to us to be afraid.

Next lesson. My father took me, still at the age of five, on one of those river passenger boats when he had to go from McGregor down to Davenport, Iowa. Two events on that trip remain vividly fixed in memory. The boat stuck on a sand bar, and as the crew took the soundings around her I heard the cries “Mark twain,” which Samuel Clemens had heard before on those same boats and which acquired fame as his pseudonym. There the foundations were laid for my interest both in hydrostatic measurements and in the study of American humor as exemplified by Mark Twain.

But that trip also introduced me to the field of industrial relations, and taught me something about the laws of the inclined plane. For when we stopped at Clinton a gang of a dozen or more Negroes began to roll many barrels in a row up the gangplank into the boat. One poor Negro, who did not fully understand the laws of inclined planes, lost his barrel on the gangplank and it plunged into the river, and my tender soul was shocked and my young indignation aroused by the tongue-lashing which the gang boss proceeded to administer. I registered the five-year-old conviction that that was not the way to get the best service out of labor – a very important lesson.

Only a few weeks later Father took his three little boys, aged seven, five and three, in a rowboat across the Mississippi for a day of fishing at the mouth of the Wisconsin River. A big log raft was coming down the river, and just as we were passing it a fish, say twenty inches long, jumped out of the river and flopped about on the raft. A man rushed out of the lumberman’s cabin on the raft and caught it with his hands. This was my introduction to the fisherman’s art. I recognized in the raftsman a good fly-fisherman.

My father tied our rowboat to a rough floating dock on the shore, and while he was arranging his fishing tackle several rods away, I decided to entertain myself by jumping back and forth between the prow of the boat and the mooring platform. But the boat pushed back as I jumped forward, and so I fell into the water and would not be here now had not my father rushed around and pulled me out from under the edge of the platform where I was headed for a five-year-old’s watery grave. This was my first laboratory experiment on the principle of inertia. It introduced me to Newton’s third law of motion.

Before we moved away from McGregor a year later I had my first hard struggle with conscience and received a D grade in my first course in ethics. My father had offered his three boys five cents each if we would go a week without clearing our throats in an unpleasant way, which he thought was becoming a habit. I stood it as long as I could – it was terrible restraint – and then I went out behind the barn and had a snorting debauch. When the nickel distribution time arrived and I was asked whether I had earned the reward, I was not hardened criminal enough as yet to lie baldly, but answered that I had slipped only once or twice. This, I convinced myself, was quite true if I counted each debauch as a single slip, but I had been terribly tortured with doubts in reaching a satisfactory definition of a unit event. Father, doubtless seeing what had been going on inside my awakening conscience, did not press the point, but gave me the nickel merely with the comforting remark that he thought I had earned it. A great weight dropped from my soul. I had had an introduction to moral philosophy and also to international statesmanship, for the essence of statesmanship, I believe, is found in the art of finding a formula.

At the age of six I had also begun to investigate experimentally the laws of falling bodies, for in rolling around on the back porch floor with my brother I rolled through a narrow opening underneath the railing and had a clean, free fall of about eight feet. I landed on the cellar stairs and regained consciousness a few minutes later, but too late to have retained as a result of the project the correct value of the acceleration of gravity, 32 feet per second. And so, in spite of the absence in McGregor of a formalized progressive education movement, it will be seen that by the age of seven I had actually made a satisfactory start on the road to a well-rounded modern education.

In 1875 the family moved to Maquoketa, Iowa, a town of three thousand inhabitants forty miles northwest of Clinton, Iowa, where my education continued for the next eleven years. Although fifteen miles from the river, it was classed as “a river town,” a classification which might be taken to mean that it had its full quota of saloons (thirteen of them) and that the staunch republicanism of most Iowa towns would be here diluted by a strong democratic vote, which in Iowa at that time was for most purposes identifiable with the saloon vote. I mention this merely because for most of those eleven years, we lived on Platt Street, where all the saloons were located, and I was exposed to many of the rougher influences that are often found in the small Midwest town. I have never felt that the rougher influences did me any lasting harm, and they contributed to my realistic understanding of life. I got the other side at home. And on the whole Maquoketa had more than its share of families of background, ideals and culture, the majority of them of New England origin, though a number of prominent families, perhaps a third of them, stemmed from Virginia. However, these last soon lost their Southern accent, their children completely so, engulfed as they were in the all-conquering Middle-West speech imported from western New England and having in it the Scotch and Scotch-Irish “r”. For I estimate that this speech, with small variations, is used, perhaps unfortunately, by eighty-five or ninety per cent of the English-speaking inhabitants of the New World.

In the interim between leaving McGregor and going to Maquoketa to live, my mother and her five children went to stay for a few months at the home of my grandfather, Daniel Franklin Millikan, in Lyndon, Illinois, eight miles south of Morrison.

Like most of the Western pioneers, the Daniel Millikan family had a wonderfully educative, self-contained economy, my grandfather running the farm, himself killing the cattle, tanning their hides, and, from them, making with his own hands the shoes for the family, where my grandmother spun the yarn and made the clothes. It was in that family that I lived for a few months in my seventh year. Here I had an impressive object lesson in self-help, saving, industry, and home economics. Even in the case of a boy of seven, seeing a life like that goes much farther than words ever do in creating habits and molding character. Indeed, example is of course the supreme teacher. All of our pedagogy and all of our educational organization, no matter how many billions we spend upon it, is trivial and impotent in comparison with home example. When we deplore the tendencies of modern youth a little observation will generally show where the trouble lies. It is the behavior of the parents, not of the children, that sets the modern pace toward cocktail parties and kindred disintegrating and unwholesome influences. That in the United States we spend nine billion dollars per year on alcoholic drinks alone, more than twice as much as we spend on our whole public school system and more than we spend on all our private and public schools combined, constitutes a terrific indictment of the intelligence of the American people, indeed of the whole of our Anglo-Saxon civilization.

I shall presently say something about the formal side of education in Maquoketa, some of which was very good, better than much that I see about me in the public schools today. But the part of my education that I got outside of school in those eleven years was superb. We lived on the very edge of town with a big pasture a hundred yards away, and beyond it the primitive woods (for Maquoketa means “Big Timber”) through which ran the Maquoketa River. My father and mother brought up a family of six, three boys and three younger girls, on the small-town preacher’s salary of $1,300 a year. We wore two-piece suits of blue jeans and no shoes from the close of school at the end of May until its beginning about the tenth of September. Our yard contained about an acre of ground in which Father and his three boys raised potatoes, corn, melons, and all manner of garden truck, along with strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and currants, and in the winter we boys sawed ten sticks of four-foot wood a day so long as our ten cords lasted. In vacation we were required to work mornings in the garden, but the afternoons we had free for our play.

Practically every afternoon for eight or ten years in summertime Father collected his three boys and a dozen others from the neighborhood and accompanied us down through the meadows and the woods to the river, where we swam, and dived from an eight-foot-high bank, played in the sand, rode down the river on logs and shot the rapids through a break in an old dam. After we came back we played baseball, sheepfold, prisoner’s base, “anti over,” or any one of a dozen games known to all boys. We kept two cows of our own which I milked twice a day for five or six years – on two well remembered occasions at 40° below zero Fahrenheit, too. For some three years, in order to earn money for my savings account such as Mother taught all her children to set up, I tended to a neighbor’s horse, milked his cow, and mowed his large lawn. One of the finest of youthful experience came when one of four farmer neighbors let us three Millikan boys break three of his colts for riding. The thrill of riding bareback on a racing horse is something never to be forgotten.

We often got up at three o’clock in the morning to see the circus come to town, or to get down to the river to fish when the biting was best. We always spat on our bait for luck, and did all the other things recounted in William Allen White’s Court of Boyville. Each fall we gathered many sacks of hazelnuts and walnuts for our winter supply. As we grew older we rigged up in our barn, the rendezvous of all the neighborhood boys, a turning pole and parallel bars, and we invested in boxing gloves and ten-pound dumbbells. The life we led kept me in such good physical condition that I never had an absence in my four-year high school course. I later earned most of my way through college by acting as student gymnasium director – a job which I got simply because I had acquired some competence and the necessary muscles in our old barn. I was urged at one time to make physical education a life work and had the road all opened for it, but chose another field instead.

It will have been noticed that there was a fair amount of work and thrift in that extracurricular education. We boys raised and sold dozens of chickens each year. Indeed, beginning at the age of fourteen I spent summer vacations working ten hours a day in a local barrel-head factory at a dollar a day, a wage of which I was very proud. It made me so cocky that I proposed to my parents thenceforth to be independent of them save for board and room – a contract which I also kept.

Upon graduation from the Maquoketa High School in 1885, just after my seventeenth birthday, I learned shorthand and acted as a court reporter for a small part of a year, for I did not start away to school until fifteen months after graduation. Six dollars a day, the regular court reporter’s wage, looked like a million to me. I have always been especially content with that court experience. For watching court procedure, seeing juries empanelled and cases tried in the Jackson County circuit court, gave me a respect for the law and the courts which some American, even of the greater prominence, never seem to have acquired. Such was the extra-curricular education of the 1880’s in a small Iowa town.

And now, turn to the classroom and back to the year 1875, when the Millikans landed in Maquoketa. The first year thereafter my mother taught us at home. I remember vividly her reading Hiawatha to us. In 1876 great fortune came to me in that my father and mother decided to take me to the Philadelphia Centennial with them. As I stood in Philadelphia, at the age of eight before the great Corliss engine, which drove all the machinery used in the exposition, I became at once an engineer. Also, I heard the talk about the Bell telephone being exhibited there. At any rate, when we returned to Maquoketa we boys rigged up a tin-can telephone system between our house and the neighbors’. Taking two cans, we knocked the bottom out of each and stretched paper tightly over the opening, forming a diaphragm. The “Telephone wire” was a string attached at both ends to the middles of the diaphragms. Thus, keeping the string taut and talking into the open ends of the cans, we telephoned between our houses 100 yards or more apart.

That fall I was sent for the first time to the ward school, where within three months I had my second very bothersome lesson in moral philosophy – one which disturbed my peace of mind for months or even years. Whispering to our neighbors was forbidden. One day when the noise became unbearable the teacher began at the other end of the row of seats, which terminated with my own, and asked each boy if he had whispered that day. Not one of them had ever thought of such a thing, and as each boy made his denial and as the teacher’s accusing finger came down the row toward me I found myself madly searching for “my formula.” When the blow struck my seat I had found it and said “No”, for of course I had not whispered even if I had “talked out loud a little,” as I said to myself. I lost more sleep over that crime than any other I ever committed. It came back to torment my soul through all my childhood. Nothing else of educational significance stands out so vividly in memory in pre-high-school days, unless it be the fact that from the age of ten or eleven I always had some young lady in my grade in school whom I distantly adored. My fancies, however, were always monogamous; they never tolerated more than one at a time. But the passing years brought changes.

In the high school I had some stimulating teachers, one a man, Dan Priaulx by name, largely self-educated, who kept his algebra class competing hard with one another in solving problems. He had not learned that competition was harmful. Why? Because he had lived and observed and reflected, and was in fact a born thinker and educator. He would send us all to the board at once, give us a problem and then say, “I’ll buy two quarts of peanuts for the pupil who gets the right answer first.” Then he would take the sixteen of us down to the store, in school hours, too, and buy the winner his very big bag of peanuts. Of course they were passed around. Once on a final examination he came into the room and said, “It isn’t fair always to make me give you examinations. You write out the examination questions on this course.” Each one of us did just that, and he marked us on how well we covered the subject in our questions. Again, he made us commit to memory every week some familiar quotation for recitation to the school on Friday afternoon. I thus stored my mind with a goodly number of bits of classic literature, which I have found useful all my life. I am sorry that this custom is not as highly regarded now as formerly. One may not understand the quotation when he learns it, but the significance of it will come to him in later life, and he will thank the parent or teacher who wove it into his young being.

In the field of science the Maquoketa High School made a pathetic showing. Indeed, I had practically no science at all in my high school course, and I think high school science instruction throughout the country was at that time in general very poor.

The principal of the high school, who was also the teacher of physics, was in the habit of spending his summers locating wells with the aid of “the water witch,” a forked hazel stick which was supposed to turn down in a particular way when it was brought over a locality in which it would be useful to sink a well. This same teacher, who taught without the assistance of laboratory work though he occasionally made a classroom demonstration for us, protested vigorously, for the following reason, against the textbook’s assertion that sound was a vibratory mode of motion of the air. He asked the class how far we could hear a katydid. When we ventured to reply, “A half-mile,” he got us to compute the weight of a hemisphere of air half a mile in radius – the project method was already hoary with age – and then triumphantly asked the class how many of us were foolish enough to believe that a katydid could set into motion half a ton of air “with a mere kick from its tiny hind leg.” Such an assertion, he declared, would be “sheer nonsense,” so that we would have to find some better explanation of sound than the textbook provided. Those who glory in the development of the critical attitude without too much concern about the soundness of the criticism (and among moderns their name is legion) will approve of my early scientific training.

One more incident of these Maquoketa days may have some little bearing upon the then existing state of American science, especially in the more remote parts of the country. It was the period which saw the development of the great American game of baseball, a game which first became a recognized American sport just after the Civil War. When as a child I first played in this game in about 1876, the rules, like those of cricket at that time, required the pitcher to deliver the ball from below his knee. The catcher stood far back of the batter, wore no mask, and caught the ball after it’s first bound. I remember well when that pitcher in Maquoketa’s baseball contests with surrounding towns was first allowed to deliver the ball above his shoulder and the catcher donned a mask and glove and moved up to his present place just behind the batter. It was this change that brought in the curved ball, a phenomenon which my father, himself a college graduate, stoutly maintained was an impossibility, an optical illusion of some sort, until we boys set up three poles in a line in our back yard and my cousin repeatedly pitched a curve ball so that it visibly began and ended its flight on the west side of the two end poles but passed the middle pole on its east side. Father was then scientist enough to withdraw his opposition to the curved ball, though its theory, so far as we knew, had not as yet been worked out.

I have sketched the kind of education one particular Middle West boy got in the eighties. Can one get a better one now? Perhaps, but I wonder. One very significant difference between now and then is that then only a small proportion, say a tenth, of the boy population remained in school up to the age of seventeen. Most of my own boy friends quit school and went to work at about thirteen, while today practically the whole youth population remains in school, by law, up to the age of sixteen to eighteen. This is as it should be if we are going to make a continuing success of our democratic – better, our republican or representative – form of government.

Certain it is that if our democracy is to continue to succeed in competition with other forms of social organization it must do three jobs much better than it is doing them now. In addition to giving every boy and girl through our public school system a chance to show by the time he completes the twelfth grade what his interests, aptitudes, and abilities are, we must improve on our present practices in fitting him into our American life. This, I think, we can do as follows:
1. Throughout the high school years (thirteen to seventeen), and particularly through examinations at the end of the twelfth grade, we can do a vastly better vocational guidance job than we have done thus far, in the endeavor to see that each youth gets into the place in our American life in which he is best qualified to live happily and successfully. This means steering away from our so-called “higher educational system” that very large fraction of the population that is not qualified to succeed in the pursuits for which the colleges and universities attempt to prepare them. In that responsibility we educators have failed badly so far.
2. We must provide, through vocational schools or the apprenticeship techniques so successfully used in Europe, for young people who do not demonstrate an aptitude for the analytical professionals the opportunity to live happily and usefully through the mastery of the manual arts and the commercial skills, which actually yield more satisfactions and better incomes than third-rate lawyers or teachers receive. We educators have very largely neglected this job so far.
3. We must see to it that our public school system is one of the main agencies for making at least 51 per cent of the oncoming generation reasonably intelligent voters. Without this result no democratic, representative government can possibly endure. It is now within our power to accomplish this, and more. Within the past seventy years, we have expanded our public secondary school system, so that it now touches practically the whole of the oncoming generation up to the age of about seventeen. This carries with it, almost incidentally, without any appreciable change in curriculum and without getting into controversial fields, the possibility of incorporating into the warp and woof of the whole of the oncoming generation a fee established, non-controversial principles and truths underlying all intelligent, rational living. It is within our power through the weekly student assembly, if we will but use it rightly, to change in one generation the whole mode of thought and of life of the American people. Have we American educators the intelligence and the character to grasp that new and matchless opportunity provided by the fact that practically the whole of young America is now legally kept in school up the age of sixteen to eighteen? If political influences make this impossible in the high school, then it certainly can, and I hope will, be made a part of the year of national service, of which I have been a convinced proponent.
I graduated from the Maquoketa High School in 1885 in a class of two boys and thirteen girls. I am thankful that I had first-class teaching, at least in algebra, Latin and history – perhaps by antiquated methods but in my judgment more effective methods than some more modern ones.
In the fall of 1886 I entered the preparatory department of Oberlin College, of which my grandmother’s brother, Peter Pinder Pease, had been one of the two recognized founders. His brother, Hiram Pease, an inveterate punster, whom my brother and I visited on his sickbed when we reached Oberlin, greeted us with “Boys, keep out of politics, for they are the measiliest ticks that ever pestered God’s sheep.” On that visit he also read us the epitaph that he had just composed for his tombstone. It read:

Under the sod and under these trees
Lies the body of Hiram A. Pease.
He is not here, only his pod.
He has shelled out his soul and gone home to God.