Mihajlo Pupin

Who is Mihajlo Pupin?

Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin was a Serbian-American physicist, inventor, and philanthropist born in the village of Idvor, in the Vojvodina region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He emigrated to the United States as a young man with almost no money, working manual labor jobs before earning admission to Columbia University, and later studying physics in Germany under Hermann von Helmholtz. Pupin became a professor of electromechanics at Columbia, where he made his most significant contribution: the invention of loading coils, known as "pupinization," which dramatically extended the range of long-distance telephone and telegraph transmission by reducing signal distortion. He held numerous patents in wireless telegraphy and X-ray technology and won the Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography, "From Immigrant to Inventor," in 1924. Pupin was also a dedicated advocate for Serbian and South Slavic causes, playing an important diplomatic role during and after World War I, and he helped found what later became NASA's precursor organizations through his work with early aeronautics research bodies.

Sources: Mihajlo Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923) · Columbia University archives, Michael Pupin papers · Pulitzer Prize Board, 1924 Biography or Autobiography citation