The great Serbian physicist, electrical engineer and inventor, Mihailo Pupin, a world-renown scientist, died on March 12, 1935.
Pupin was born in 1854, and from his native Idvor, in Banat, 1874, after schooling in Pančevo and Prague, he went to the United States where he graduated from Columbia University in New York.
He was then Professor of Theoretical Physics and President of the Institute of Radio Engineers for 40 years.
An electrical resonator that allows simultaneous transmission of news at different wavelengths through the same conductor was the first of his many inventions.
The biggest breakthrough – self-induction coils / Pupin coils / made it possible to transmit long-distance telephone conversations.
He also discovered secondary X-rays, electromagnetic detectors, and wrote a university textbook on thermodynamics.
In 1920 he was awarded the Edison Medal for his scholarly work, and for the book on his life, The Immigrant to Inventory, translated under the title “From Pasture to Scientist.”
Pupin received the Pulitzer Prize in 1924. Its name is borne by Columbia University’s physics laboratories.
In 1912, the Kingdom of Serbia appointed Pupin as Honorary Consul to the United States.
He did this duty until 1920. From this position, he made a great contribution to the establishment of interstate and wider social relations between the Kingdom of Serbia, and later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the United States.
At the end of World War I, Pupin, as a well-known and recognized scientist at the time, but also a politically influential figure in America, influenced the final decisions of the Paris Peace Conference when deciding on the boundaries of the future Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
TST
