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Nobel prize to R. A. Millikan awarded in 1923 "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect''

MILLIKAN 1913

Millikan, R.A.;
On the Elementary Electrical Charge and the Avogadro Constant
Phys. Rev. 2 (1913) 109;

Reprinted in
Great Experiments in Physics (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1960) edited by M. H. Shamos.
The Physical Review - the First Hundred Years, AIP Press (1995) 23.

Motivation
The experiments herewith reported were undertaken with the view of introducing certain improvements into the oil-drop method of determination e and N and thus obtaining a higher accuracy than had before been possible in the evaluation of these most fundamental constants...
The results of this work may be summarized in the following table in which the numbers in the error column represent in the case of the first six numbers estimated limits of uncertainty rather than the so-called "probable errors'' which would be much smaller... itemize
Elementary electrical charge
e = 4.774 ± 0.009 x 10^-10
Number of molecules per gram molecule
N = 6.062 ± 0.012 x 10²³
Number of gas molecules per c.c. at 0^°
n = 2.705 ± 0.005 x 10¹⁹
Kinetic energy of a molecule at 0^°
E₀ = 5.621 ± 0.010 x 10^-4
Constant of molecular energy
e = 2.058 ± 0.004 x 10^-16
Constant of the entropy equation
k = 1.372 ± 0.002 x 10^-16 itemize (Extracted from the introductory part of the paper.).

Accelerator NONE Detectors OTHER

Related references
More (earlier) information appears in
R. A. Millikan, Phys. Rev. XXXII (1911) 349;