Professor Pupin and Mr. Tesla: A Historic Exchange
By
Dr. h.c. Branko Terzic
Some years ago, I came across the following transcript of a May 17, 1893 meeting and lecture of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers held in New York. The organization is a predecessor of today’s Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). At these meetings lecturers also included a physical demonstration, when possible, of the phenomena described.
What drew my attention to this transcript was the fact that it includes a brief exchange between two of America’s most eminent Serbs and experimenters in electricity; Columbia University Professor Michael Idvorsky Pupin and acclaimed inventor Nikola Tesla.
Uniquely, both of these internationally recognized scientists were immigrant Serbs from the different provinces of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nikola Tesla was a Serb and the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest from Gospic in Lika, now a part of Croatia, while Pupin was a Serb from Idvor in Banat, today a part of Serbia. As one might have expected, from this exchange, it would appear that the New York of the 1890’s was not large enough to accommodate two Serb egos. Read ahead and see what I mean. This is copied from the transcript with the full lecture omitted.
"A lecture delivered at the Tenth General Meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Columbia College New York, NY May 17, 1893. President Houston presiding.
PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF LOW FREQUENCY ELECTRICAL RESONANCE
BY
M.I. Pupin, Ph.D., Columbia College
"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Institute: -A large part of the subject of the following discourse was discussed by me, but in a different way, in three papers. Tow of these appeared in the April and May numbers of the American Journal of Science. The third will appear in the June number of the same journal. The method which I have adopted in the following discussion seemed preferable to the mathematical method which I followed in those papers. It is probably just as exact, and certainly a touch clearer way of viewing the variable flow of electricity, especially those features of it, which have a more or less direct potential bearing"
[ BT. There follow twenty pages of Professor Pupin’s presentation at the end of which there is a period of questions and answers from the members in attendance. Among those in attendance is Nikola Tesla.]
Discussion
The President: "Gentlemen, you have heard Dr. Pupin’s admirable paper. Does the Institute wish to make any remarks on it?”
Mr. Tesla: "Gentlemen, I do not know whether I can contribute in any way to the clear and skillful exposition which Prof. Pupin has made of the phenomena of resonance. They have been familiar to me for a long time. In fact, two or three years back I began to work on lines in which an observation of some of the rules advanced by Dr. Pupin is an absolute necessity, and one of the reasons why I have only reluctantly consented to deliver a lecture on some high frequency phenomena, which I have shown on two or three occasions was, that I felt inadequate to the task, because in every experiment one has to depend on certain delicate balances and one cannot always feel sure of succeeding in the experiment, especially in a public lecture. Dr Pupin has admirably succeeded in performing before an audience a number of different experiments.
[Mr. Tesla goes on for four pages to describe his earlier experiments, ending with…]
“I only have to add that I sincerely thank Dr. Pupin, (which probably is the wish of all) and that I have profited very much by his lecture, which is a clear and precise exposition of the principle, as well as a most interesting experimental demonstration of electrical resonance with a dynamo machine.”
“Adjourned.”
[Communicated after adjournment by Dr. Pupin]
“Mr. Tesla is very kind and generous with his compliments. I do not think, however, that his statement of facts is free from ambiguity. He states that the phenomena of resonance which I have discussed were familiar to him for a long time. My discussion referred to low frequency resonance, whereas Mr. Tesla has, I think, always worked with high frequency apparatus, so that his familiarity with low frequency resonance, the subject which I discuss, is probably not based upon his own experimental investigations. ….
With these phenomena Mr. Tesla does not appear to be familiar, either from his own experimental investigations or from investigations of others, excepting those phenomena which Dr. Duncan had investigated some time before me and which I mentioned in the course of my lecture.”
Dr. Pupin was to again show his wit and caustic style in response printed in the December 16, 1896, transcript of the same Institutes on the subject of Roentgen Rays
“Dr. M.I. Pupin: - After a discussion of this subject by two such men as Professor Rowland and Professor Thomson, it is difficult to add anything. They have certainly said a great deal about it. They both confessed their ignorance of the subject, and five minutes ago I wondered how much more they would have said if they had known anything about it.”
Many years after this exchange Michael I. Pupin went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography “From Immigrant to Inventor” while Nikola Tesla would go on to create alternating current (ac) generation and motors, the basis for today’s electric power industry worldwide. However, the two appear here in these transcripts as rivals rather than collaborators in research into the then new field of electricity. One wonders whether they ever shared some time together to speak in their native Serbian language and discuss their common heritage.
The Honorable Branko Terzic is a former Commissioner on the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and State of Wisconsin Public Service Commission, in addition to energy industry experience was a US Army Reserve Foreign Area Officer ( FAO) for Eastern Europe (1979-1990). He hold a BS Engineering and honorary Doctor of Sciences in Engineering (h.c.) both from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.
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Thank you. That was a treat. Pupin had gift of sarcasm. And Tesla went on for another four pages!
Fascinating!
Radoje Jankovic’s (pre-WWII Consul General of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Chicago and New York) memoir published under the title “Pupin, Tesla, and Američki Srbi” complements this post very well.