He was also an honorary consul of Serbia in the United States from 1912 to 1920 and played a role in determining the borders of newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Because of his activity in the "Serbian Youth" movement, which at that time had many problems with Austro-Hungarian police authorities, Pupin had to leave Pančevo.

After his father died in March 1874, the twenty-year-old Pupin decided to cancel his education in Prague due to financial problems and to move to the United States.

[14]For the next five years in the United States, Pupin worked as a manual laborer (most notably at the biscuit factory on Cortlandt Street in Manhattan) while he learned English, Greek and Latin.

After Pupin completed his studies, with emphasis in the fields of physics and mathematics, he returned to Europe, initially the United Kingdom (1883–1885), where he continued his schooling supervised by John Tyndall at the University of Cambridge.

He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin under Hermann von Helmholtz with a dissertation titled "Osmotic Pressure and its Relation to Free Energy”.

[15] In 1889 Pupin returned to Columbia University, where he was offered a position as "Teacher of Mathematical Physics in the Department of Electrical Engineering".

[18] He learned of Röntgen's discovery of unknown rays passing through wood, paper, insulators, and thin metals leaving traces on a photographic plate, and attempted this himself.

A New York surgeon, Dr. Bull, sent Pupin a patient to obtain an X-ray image of his left hand prior to an operation to remove lead shot from a shotgun injury.

AT&T were afraid they would lose control of an invention which was immensely valuable due to its ability to greatly extend the range of long-distance telephones and especially submarine ones.

When the United States joined the First World War in 1917, Pupin was working at Columbia University, organizing a research group for submarine detection techniques.

[21] Together with his colleagues, professors Wils and Morcroft, he performed numerous experiments with the aim of discovering submarines at Key West and New London.

[23] As a politically influential figure in America, Pupin participated in the final decisions of the Paris peace conference after the war, when the borders of the future kingdom (of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians) were drawn.

That is a small village which is found near the main road in Banat, which belonged to Austro-Hungary, and now is an important part of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenians Kingdom.

[24] In a difficult situation during the negotiations on the borders of Yugoslavia, Pupin personally wrote a memorandum on 19 March 1919 to American president Woodrow Wilson, who, based on the data received from Pupin about the historical and ethnic characteristics of the border areas of Dalmatia, Slovenia, Istria, Banat, Međimurje, Baranja and Macedonia, stated that he did not recognize the London agreement signed between the allies and Italy.

[30] His gifts included scientific books and subscriptions in preparation of the opening of the new building in 1926, and continued with numerous volumes from his private collection in 1932 and 1933.

The funds of the foundation were used to purchase works of Serbian artists (including Uroš Predić, Paja Jovanović, Konstantin Danil, among others) for the museum, and for the printing of certain publications.

Pupin guaranteed the delivery of food supplies to Serbia with his own resources, and he also was the head of the committee that provided help to the victims of war.

[35] Besides his patents he published several dozen scientific disputes, articles, reviews and a 396-page autobiography under the name Michael Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor (Scribner's, 1923).

During Pupin's tenure, Harold C. Urey, in his work with the hydrogen isotope deuterium demonstrated the existence of heavy water, the first major scientific breakthrough in the newly founded laboratories (1931).

In 1934 Urey was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work he performed in Pupin Hall related to his discovery of "heavy hydrogen".