FEBRUARY
2001
Your Engineering Heritage:
Is There Another Potential Pulitzer
Winner Out There?
by Frederik Nebeker
In 1874, a
young Serb studying in Prague sold almost all his possessions to purchase steerage passage
on the Hamburg-American line. Without any practical training, family or even acquaintances
in the New World, and without knowledge of English, the 14-year-old immigrant arrived in
New York with just five cents in his pocket. Over the next few years he held a variety of
jobs, learned English well, read Scientific American assiduously, and began
attending evening classes at Cooper Union. He studied for and passed the entrance exams
for Columbia College. After graduating, he studied at the University of Cambridge and then
at the University of Berlin, where he completed a Ph.D. under Herman Helmholtz.
He returned to Columbia in 1889 to take one of two
faculty positions in the newly created Department of Electrical Engineering. He later
wrote, "it was not an easy matter in those days to persuade people that
electrical science with its applications was then, or would ever be, big enough to need a
department of its own…" He went on to make vital contributions to engineering,
most notably by inventing the loading coil, which, by increasing the inductance on
telephone lines, greatly extended the range of telephony. He was the first to study the LC
tuned circuit, investigating it mathematically and building tuned circuits to analyze
electrical oscillations. He also played a leading role in establishing the profession of
electrical engineering, and he served as President of both the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers (the two predecessor societies
of the IEEE).
As many of you recognize, this story is about
Michael Pupin. He had an exciting life, and you can hear him recount it today, in his
charming autobiography From Immigrant to Inventor. (A 1980 reprinting seems to
still be in print; copies of earlier printings can be found in used book stores.)
Pupin’s autobiography, published originally in 1923, became a bestseller and won the
1924 Pulitzer Prize for biography. In fact, Pupin may be the only electrical engineer ever
to win the Pulitzer.
Electrical engineering was, however, the subject of
James Phinney Baxter’s Scientists Against Time (1947 Pulitzer Prize for
history), and computer engineering was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a
New Machine (1982 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction). One might also mention that
Benjamin Franklin, electrical researcher, was the subject of two Pulitzer Prize-winning
biographies (by William Cabell Bruce and Carl Van Doren respectively), and Samuel Morse
was the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Carleton Mabee.
Pulitzer Prizes notwithstanding, electrical,
electronics and computer engineers the world over have contributed their share of
outstanding autobiographies to library shelves. Among the best are those by Vannevar Bush,
Percy Dunsheath, John Ambrose Fleming, Ivan Getting, Akio Morita (also published in
English), Werner von Siemens (also published in English), Herbert Simon, and Konrad Zuse
(also published in English). Some of these, along with others, may be discussed in future
Heritage and History columns in IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer.
Frederik Nebeker is Senior Research
Historian at the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University. He can be reached at f.nebeker@ieee.org. |
