Mihajlo Pupin

Michael Idvorsky Pupin, known in Serbian as Mihajlo Pupin (1858 to 1935), was a Serbian-born American physicist, inventor and electrical engineer. Born in the village of Idvor in the Banat, he served as a shepherd in his youth, emigrated to New York in 1874 with very little money, worked on farms and in a cracker factory while learning English, and entered Columbia College in 1879, graduating in 1883. After study at Cambridge and under Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin, where he took his doctorate in 1889, he returned to Columbia to teach mathematical physics and, with Francis Bacon Crocker, formed the faculty of its new department of electrical engineering. In 1894 he studied wave propagation in a vibrating string and applied the finding to long distance telephony, working out the spacing of loading coils along telephone lines to extend the range of calls. In 1896 he developed rapid x-ray photography using a fluorescent screen. He presided over the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1917 and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1925 and 1926, and his autobiography From Immigrant to Inventor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924. His students included Robert Millikan, Edwin Armstrong and Irving Langmuir.