  The measurements of the electronic charge e, by Ehrenhaft and Millikan in the
early nineteen hundreds generated a bitter controversy between the orthodox and
the atomic points of views. Guided by the Pauli-Fermi neutrino model for
beta-decay in this paper we speculate that the introduction of a small
hypothetical force is adequate to account for most of the contentious
differences between the observations of Millikan and Ehrenhaft.
