Michael I. Pupin (1858-1935), Serbian-US physicist, in a laboratory. Born in Serbia, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Serbian spelling of his name is Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin. Pupin emigrated to the USA when he was 16. He graduated from Columbia, New York. His best-known invention is the Pupin coil, a device that greatly extended the range of long-distance telephones. In 1911, Pupin became a consul of the Kingdom of Serbia, and helped ensure autonomy for the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. This photograph, which was taken in the period from the 1890s to the 1930s, is from the Bain News Service, one of the USA's earliest news picture libraries.