Mihajlo Pupin: References & Edit History

Assorted References

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Many English-language sources, including standard biographical references such as American National Biography (1999) and Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (2008), record Mihajlo Pupin’s date of birth as October 4, 1858. This date matches the one on Pupin’s gravestone at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York. It is further supported by obituaries of Pupin published in The New York Times (March 13, 1935) and Science (May 17, 1935), as well as by a passage in Pupin’s autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor (1923), in which he indicates that he was a “boy of fifteen” when he landed in the United States in March 1874.

Other sources, however, suggest that Pupin was born in 1854. Among these are a number of sources originating in Serbia, such as the Web site of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which, while organized as the Serbian Royal Academy, claimed Pupin as a member. In his biographical essay on Pupin in Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science & Religion, 2nd ed. (2009), edited by Nicolaas A. Rupke, scholar Edward B. Davis states that he believes 1854 is “more likely” than 1858 to be Pupin’s birth date. Upon request, Davis provided Encyclopædia Britannica with a copy of Pupin’s baptismal record, which appears to indicate a birth date of September 27 (Old Style), 1854, and of a letter written by Pupin in 1933 that sheds light on the discrepancy. Davis had the letter translated into English by a source of his own, and Encyclopædia Britannica presented the letter to Slavic languages scholar E. Wayles Browne for further review; the following account necessarily relies on the interpretations of those individuals.

In the letter, Pupin writes that in preparation for his 1888 marriage in London (in a Greek Orthodox church), he sent for a baptismal certificate from a priest in his hometown of Idvor, Serbia. According to Pupin, when he received the document, he found that his date of birth had been transcribed as October 4, 1858. Understanding the date to be an error, he nonetheless accepted the certificate and, it seems, consistently presented the date as his actual birth date thereafter.