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Warranting the highly coveted Nobel Prize in 1923, the Millikan oil-drop experiment was a breakthrough in the understanding of the structure of an atom. Robert Millikan came to be known as one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century, as he first attempted the impressive research in 1909, resolute in determining the elementary unit of electric charge. By measuring the effect of an electric field on single drops of evaporating oil, Robert Millikan ingeniously was able to measure the charge of a single electron and then to determine it’s mass. By the beginning of the twentieth century, relatively very little was known for certain about the structure of an atom. Whereas many believed that the atom was indivisible, that belief was being critically challenged with the discovery of radioactivity. Even the idea of an elementary unit of el