The American physicist and inventor Michael Idvorsky Pupin (1858-1935) is recognized for his contributions to telephony and telegraphy, his invention of electrical tuning, and his discovery of secondary x-ray radiation.

Michael Pupin was born on Oct. 4, 1858, at Idvor in Banat Province, a part of Austria (now of Yugoslavia) settled by Serbs in 1690. The son of illiterate but highly intelligent parents who sacrificed to give their son an education, Pupin soon left the village school to study at Pancevo and then at Prague. Following the death of his father, Pupin sailed to the United States in 1874. Arriving without funds or friends, he held farm and factory jobs, learned English, and in 1879 entered Columbia College.

Pupin subsequently became the first holder of Columbia's Tyndall fellowship in physics. By then he was pursuing his studies abroad, at Cambridge and Berlin, studying mathematical physics and physical chemistry. Receiving his doctorate in 1889, he...