Millikan's oil drop experiment

1. Performing the millikan's oil drop experiment in air is tricky because air itself can be ionized and because of this, the beads may discharge over time, leading to erroneous results. If you could somehow put the entire experiment in an unionizable gas,what terms in the equations for the charges would need to be modified?

2. Along the same lines, one might imagine we may be able to have even better results if we could do this in a vacuum! Will this strategy work?