IRVINE : City Ponders Fixing Street Name Error

Twenty years ago, Irvine honored one of America’s great physicists and co-founder of the California Institute of Technology by naming a street after him.

Scientists were elated by the gesture, especially former students at Caltech, where Nobel Prize winner Robert Andrews Millikan “was a figure something like George Washington to us,” said Lee Carleton, 78, a Huntington Beach resident who studied at Caltech while Millikan conducted pioneering research into cosmic rays.

“Somebody (in Irvine) had good intentions,” Carleton said. “But not all of us are good spellers.”

It seems the developer, in proposing street names to the city’s building department, wrote the name down as “Milliken Avenue.” Today, the City Council will consider fixing the 20-year-old error by spending $350 to patch an “A” over the wrong vowel on 12 street signs to give Millikan his proper due.

“In honor of a great American scientist, we should spell his name right,” said Councilman Bill Vardoulis, who requested that the council approve the correction after receiving a letter from the Caltech Alumni Assn.

City officials have no record of why the name was misspelled on 1972 tract maps. Either the developer didn’t know how to spell Millikan’s name or it was merely a typographical mistake that slipped everyone’s notice, said Sherry Richardson, a city engineering technician who works on street naming.

The misspelled name, though, jumped out at Carleton, a 1933 Caltech graduate.

“It was glaring to me that Dr. Millikan’s name was spelled wrong,” he said. He first noticed the mistake about five years ago when someone pointed out that the area of Irvine, home to several high-technology companies and manufacturers, is filled with streets named after famous scientists, including all three Caltech founders.

Milliken Avenue, which joins Barranca Parkway just west of Jamboree Road, is between Hale and Noyes avenues, named after chemist Alfred Amos Noyes and astronomer George Ellery Hale. Millikan, Hale and Noyes are sometimes called the “holy trinity” at Caltech because they helped the campus become known as one of the great research institutes in the country in just a few years.

The three scientists join physicists Albert A. Michelson, Edward Teller, John Bardeen, chemist Arnold O. Beckman and other famed scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Lord William Thomson Kelvin in having streets named for them in the Irvine industrial park across from the Tustin Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station.

If the council approves the spelling correction, it should not cause too much of a hardship on businesses along Milliken because the post office will be notified of the two possible spellings, said Sheri Vander Dussen, Irvine’s manager of development services. Businesses could change stationery and business cards over time when reordering supplies, she said.

So far, the city has received one letter protesting the name change.

Colette Leider, an owner of Gunther’s Printing on Milliken Avenue, said customers who come by and see the street name “Millikan” on signs and notice “Milliken” on the shop’s delivery van, price lists, calendars and other promotional material might question the company’s professional standards.

“Being a printer of all things, it’s going to show a very poor image to have our street name spelled incorrectly on all our advertising,” Leider said.

The council is scheduled to consider the matter at its 5 p.m. session.