Robert Millikan was an experimental physicist. He left the University of Chicago to become the president of the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, in 1921. He served in that position until his retirement in 1945. Doc Brown was a professor at Caltech in 1943. He had managed to convince Robert Milikan to arrange an interview with Major General Leslie Groves and Vannevar Bush. They were searching for scientists to work on the top secret Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Despite a disastrous interview, he was awarded the position.