Michael Pupin (1858)
Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Michael Pupin, American physicist and inventor, was born in Austria-Hungary in 1858. He immigrated to the United States in 1874, graduated from Columbia University in physics in 1883, and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin in 1889. Pupin taught at Columbia for more than 40 years, 30 of them as a professor of electromechanics.
Pupin improved the quality of long-distance telephone and telegraph transmission by inserting coils in the long lines at intervals; he discovered that matter struck by X-rays is stimulated to radiate other X-rays (secondary radiation) and invented an electrical resonator. He received 34 patents for his inventions, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for his autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor.
