Mihajlo Pupin was born on October 9, 1854 in a village called Idvor in the Kovačica municipality in Banat. His father, Konstantin (Kosta) and mother, Olimpijada were farmers and they had ten children –five boys and five girls.

His parents were illiterate, but very intelligent people who brought up Mihajlo in a strict and patriarchal manner.

He completed elementary school in Idvor and junior high school in Pančevo, and upon the recommendation of protoiereus Živković, and at his mother’s wish, in 1872, he went to Prague, in the present-day Czech Republic. While in Prague, he was more interested in the national struggle of the Czechs, than in school. It was for this reason that on March 12, 1874 he set off for America on the ship “Westfalia”.

Pupin spent the first five years upon his arrival to USA living under very difficult conditions. He worked as a laborer, initially on fields, as a porter, and doing similar jobs, and later he worked in a cracker factory in New York and attended the Cooper Union night school. After becoming a clerical assistant, he applied for and passed the entrance exam at Columbia University in New York City in the autumn of 1879. Pupin immediately stood out as a model student. He received a complimentary scholarship and already at the end of the first year, he was presented with two pecuniary awards (for Greek and mathematics). He made a living mostly by tutoring his weaker fellow-students and by doing physical work.

“Try to go from one end of the road to another and you will see that either end has its beauties which thrill the hearts of people of science. Try that and you will no longer be talking about ‘cold scientific facts’.”

He graduated in 1883 and became an American citizen on the day before graduation. As he was an excellent student he received a scholarship for the studies of mathematics and physics at Cambridge, England (1883–1885) and then in Berlin (1885–1889) under the famous experimental physicist Helmholtz, where he specialized in physical chemistry and in 1889, received his PhD under the guidance of professor Helmholtz on the subject “Osmotic Pressure and its Relation to Free Energy”.

In 1888 in London, he married Sarah Katherine Jackson, the sister of his friend and future colleague, William Jackson. They had a daughter Varvara (Barbara).

In 1889, he returned to America, where he began his academic career as a lecturer in theoretical physics at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Columbia's School of Mines.

His research between 1892 and 1895 was centered on electrical resonance, among other fields. Owing to the principle of resonance, Pupin managed to perform an analysis for composite alternating current much like the analysis his teacher, Helmholtz, had done for sound.

After Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays at the end of 1885, it was already in 1886 that Pupin conducted an experiment with a fluorescent screen, reducing the time needed from one hour to a few minutes, consequently discovering secondary x-rays.

Miloš Crnjanski described Mihajlo Pupin as a “mighty master of electrical inventions”.

In April 1886, he came down with a bad case of pneumonia, a disease that ultimately killed his wife who was nurturing him at the time. He took this very hard. He retired and, accompanied by his daughter, traveled to the village of Norfolk where he purchased a property.

After recovery, he devoted himself to his most important discovery – the mathematical solution of the problem relating to alternating telephone current transmission in ducts. He elaborated the new mathematical theory of oscillation transmission along a wire with distributed masses, producing the necessary output in an inductive analogous electrical model. Pupin made the cable transmission of long-distance telephone signals possible.

At the beginning of the XX century, pupinization set off on its triumphant journey.

Pupin’s teaching career lasted until 1929. His students themselves became great scientists, including the Nobel Prize winners, Milliken and Langmuir. He advocated improving the status of scientific work and research, constantly emphasizing the need for education reforms.

He was appointed president or vice president of the highest scientific and professional institutions, such as: The New York Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, etc. Pupin was also a prolific writer. He published a number of books; the most important being “Thermodynamics” and the autobiography titled “From Immigrant to Inventor” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.

He was knowledgeable in classical and contemporary history and literature, had a love for poetry, and spoke Serbian, English, German, French, Greek, and Latin. He registered 24 patents.

Pupin was a world-class inventor in three fields – telecommunications, radio technology, and radiology. When America entered WWI, Pupin set up a group for the research of the submarine detection technique, yielding important results.

The Physics Department building, dubbed the “Pupin Laboratory” was constructed in 1927 at Columbia University in New York. It was there that, while Pupin was still alive, Harold Urey discovered heavy hydrogen. It is also where the construction of the first nuclear battery was started, and in 1934, Urey was awarded the Nobel Prize. In his eighties, his strength began to fail. Over time, his partial lower limb paralysis deteriorated, rendering him paralyzed toward the end of his life.

He died on March 12, 1935 in a New York hospital, precisely 61 years after setting off from Europe for the New World. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. There, he was laid to his final resting place with full honors befitting his scientific and social achievements.

PUPIN’S CONTRIBUTION TO CHEMISTRY

During his studies in Berlin, Mihajlo Pupin’s scientific journey crossed paths with physical chemistry. He received a PhD in this field at the time when it was developing as a science in its own right. The year 1887 is considered the birth year of physical chemistry. It was then that the first magazine specializing in this field, Zeitschrift fur Physikalische Chemie, was first published. Its editors were Wilhelm Ostwald, a chemist from Leipzig, Swedish physicist Svante August Arrhenius, and Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff, a Dutchman who had already been considered a physical chemist. All of them were later awarded the Nobel Prize. Pupin listed this magazine as a reference in his dissertation.

Therefore, although the year 1887 cannot be considered as the birth year of physical chemistry, but rather as the year it became a fully-fledged science, it should nonetheless be mentioned that Pupin received a PhD in physical chemistry only two years after the first magazine specialized in that field had been published for the first time.

The fact that Pupin defended his PhD dissertation in physical chemistry is a particularly important one for us since physical chemistry has a long-standing tradition here. In 1903, 16 years after the first magazine specialized in physical chemistry had been published for the first time, physical chemistry was introduced as an official subject at Velika škola, the highest educational institution in Belgrade at the time.