Michael Pupin

Pupin arrived at Castle Garden in 1874 with five cents in his pocket. He worked as a labourer on Delaware farms, learned English well enough to enter Columbia, graduated in 1883, and went on to a PhD in Berlin. In 1894 he patented the loading coil — a method of inserting inductance into telephone lines at regular intervals — that finally made long-distance telephony commercially viable. AT&T bought the rights in 1900. He taught electrical engineering at Columbia for nearly four decades and trained much of the first American generation of radio and telephone engineers. His memoir From Immigrant to Inventor, published in 1923, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography the following year — the immigrant story given the imprimatur of the immigrant publisher's prize.