Mihajlo Pupin
Categories: 1858 births | 1935 deaths | Electrical engineers | Pulitzer Prize winners | Serbian scientists | American physicists | Serbian physicists | People of Vojvodina
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Image:Michael Idvorsky Pupin.jpg Inventor and scientist |
Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin (1854, October 4 - March 12, 1935) (A.k.a "Michael I. Pupin") Serbian and American physicist who devised a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils (of wire) at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire (this research was done initially by Oliver Heaviside).
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Biography
Pupin was born in the village Idvor near Pančevo (in Banat, then Austria-Hungary, now Serbia and Montenegro). His parents were illiterate immigrants from Prespa region, Macedonia. Pupin emigrated to U.S. as a 16 year old. He graduated with honors in 1883 at Columbia College, New York. Having obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin in 1889, he returned to Columbia University to become a teacher of mathematical physics. Pupin's research pioneered carrier wave detection and current analysis.
Pupin's 1894 invention, now known as "Pupin coil", extended the range of long-distance telephones. In 1896 he developed a method of rapid x-ray photography, requiring an exposure of only a fraction of a second, rather than that of an hour or more. In 1901, he became a professor and, in 1931, a professor emeritus of Columbia University. In 1911 Pupin became a consul of Kingdom of Serbia in New York. In his speech to Congress on January 8, 1918, known as the Fourteen Points speech, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, inspired by his conversations with Pupin, insisted on the restoration of Serbia and Montenegro, as well as autonomy for the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Michael Pupin's autobiography, "From Immigrant to Inventor", won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924. He also wrote "The New Reformation" (1927) and "Romance of the Machine" (1930), as well as many technical papers. In his many popular writings, Pupin advanced the view that modern science supported and enhanced belief in God. Pupin was active with the Serb émigré socities in the USA, he was the first president and founder of the Serbian National Defense Council of America.
Honors and tributes
Columbia University's Pupin Hall, the site of Pupin Physics Laboratory, is a building completed in 1927 and named after him in 1935. There is a small crater on the Moon named in his honor. In 1920, he received AIEE's Edison Medal 'For his work in mathematical physics and its application to the electric transmission of intelligence.'
Patents
- U.S. Patent 1541845, Electrical wave transmission.
- U.S. Patent 1834735, Inductive artifical lines.
External links
- Michael I Pupin at IEEE History Center
- Michael I Pupin at Eugenii Katz's Famous Scientists site
- Michael Idvorsky Pupinde:Mihajlo Pupin Idvorski