Interview with Clare Mallory Millikan

Abstract

An interview in January 1981 with Clare Mallory Millikan, daughter of mountaineer George Mallory and wife of Glenn Millkan (1906-1947), second son of Robert Andrews Millikan, Caltech’s first executive head. In this interview, Mrs. Millikan recalls meeting her future husband in 1937, while she was a Cambridge university undergraduate reading history and Glenn Millikan, a Cambridge PhD, was a tutorial supervisor at Trinity College and working under E. D. Adrian in the university’s Physiology Department. She discusses their mutual love of hiking and climbing. A year later, they were married, and when World War II broke out they were in the United States, where Glenn soon went to work for Detlev Bronk, at the Johnson Foundation for Medical Physics of the University of Pennsylvania, and later at Cornell Medical College in New York City. She describes their lives during the war years and something of his work with John Pappenheimer on the Millikan oximeter, with which the U.S. Army Air Force equipped its fighter pilots to keep them from blacking out at high altitudes. She recalls their move to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1946, where Glenn Millikan headed the Physiology Department, and his fatal accident in May 1947 while they were climbing in the Cumberland Mountains. She remarks on her impressions of and relations with her in-laws: Robert and Greta Millikan and Glenn’s two brothers, Clark and Max Millikan.