Sir Jagadish Chandra BosePage 3597 of Issue 30022. The London Gazette (17 April 1917). Retrieved 1 September 2010. (;"Bose". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. ; 30 November 1858 – 23 November 1937) was a polymath with interests in biology, physics and writing science fiction. He was a pioneer in the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction. A crater on the Moon was named in his honour.Bose (crater) He founded the Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia. He served as the Director of Bose Institute from its inception until his death.
Born in Mymensingh, Bengal Presidency (present-day Bangladesh), during British governance of India, Bose graduated from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta (now Kolkata, West Bengal, India). Prior to his enrollment at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta, Bose attended Pabna Zilla School and Dhaka Collegiate School, where he began his educational journey. He attended the University of London to study medicine, but had to give it up due to health problems. Instead, he conducted research with Nobel Laureate, Lord Rayleigh at the University of Cambridge. Bose returned to India to join the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta as a professor of physics. There, despite racial discrimination and a lack of funding and equipment, Bose carried on his scientific research. He made progress in his research into radio waves in the microwave spectrum and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves.
Bose made pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli and proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues. Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions because of peer pressure, but he was generally critical of the patent system. To facilitate his research, he constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements; these instruments produced some striking results, such as quivering of injured plants, which Bose interpreted as a power of feeling in plants. His books include Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902) and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926). In a 2004 BBC poll to name the Greatest Bengali of All Time, Bose placed seventh.
Early life and education Jagadish Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858 to a Bengali Kayastha family of Brahmos in Mymensingh, Bengal Presidency (now part of Bangladesh). His family was originally from the village of Rarhikhal in Munshiganj, Dacca district. His father was a leading member of the Brahmo Samaj and worked as a civil servant with the title Deputy Magistrate and Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) in several places, including Faridpur and Bardhaman.Mukherji, pp. 3–10.
Bose's father sent Bose to a Bengali-language school for his early education, as it was important to him that his son should study in his native language and culture before studying in English. Speaking at the Bikrampur Conference in 1915, Bose described the effect this early education had on him:
Bose joined the Hare School in Kolkata in 1869, followed by SFX Greenherald International School, also in Dhaka. In 1875, he passed the entrance examination of the University of Dhaka and was admitted to St Xavier's College, Calcutta. There, he met Jesuit Father Eugene Lafont, who played a significant role in developing his interest in natural sciences. He received a BA from the University of Dhaka in 1879.
Bose wanted to follow his father into the Indian Civil Service, but his father forbade it, saying his son should be a scholar who would "rule nobody but himself." Bose went to England to study medicine at the University of London, but had to quit because of ill health, possibly worsened by the chemicals used in the dissection rooms.
Through the recommendation of Anandamohan Bose, his brother-in-law and the first Indian Wrangler at the University of Cambridge, Bose secured admission to Christ's College, Cambridge, to study natural sciences. He received a BSc from University College London affiliated under University of LondonJagadis Chandra Bose, Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose, His Life and Speeches, The Cambridge Press, Madras (Project Gutenberg eBook), in 1883 and a BA (Natural Sciences Tripos) from the University of Cambridge
Among Bose's teachers at Cambridge were Lord Rayleigh, Michael Foster, James Dewar, Francis Darwin, Francis Balfour, and Sidney Vines. While at Cambridge, he met University of Edinburgh student Prafulla Chandra Roy, with whom he became close friends. In February 1887, Bose married feminist and social worker Abala Bose.
Professorship at Presidency College
After obtaining a degree from the University of Cambridge Bose returned to India. Henry Fawcett had given Bose an introduction to Lord Ripon, the Viceroy of India, who recommended him for a post to the Director of Public Instruction in Kolkata. In those days such posts in the Imperial Education Service were usually reserved for Europeans. Bose was appointed as an officiating professor of physics at Presidency College. Although the principal Charles Henry Tawney and Director of Education Alfred Woodley Croft were reluctant to appoint him, Bose took up his post in January 1885.S. Ramaseshan, The centennial of the discovery of millimetre waves by Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858–1937), Current Science, Vol. 70, No. 2 (25 January 1996), pp. 172-175
At that time, an Indian professor was paid two-thirds the salary of a European, and since his appointment was considered temporary, this was further halved, leaving him with one-third the pay of his European peers. As a protest, Bose declined his salary and worked without remuneration for the first three years at Presidency College.
He was popular among the students for his teaching style and demonstration of experiments. He got rid of the roll call. After three years in this temporary post, the value of his professorial work was recognized by Tawney and Croft, who made Bose's appointment permanent with retrospective effect. Bose received his full pay for the last three years in a lump sum. However, another source states that his appointment was made permanent on 21 September 1903, some 8 years after his joining the college.
Bose used his own money to fund his research projects as well as receiving funding and support from the social activist nun Sister Nivedita.
Microwave radio research
Bose became interested in radio following the 1894 publication of British physicist Oliver Lodge's demonstrations on how to transmit and detect radio waves.Mukherji, pp. 14–25 He began his own research in the new field in November 1894, setting up his equipment in small 20 ft sq room at Presidency College. Wanting to study the light-like properties of radio waves which were hard to study using long radio waves, he managed to reduce the waves to the millimetre level (in the microwave range of about 5 mm wavelength).
Bose's research was not initially appreciated by his department at the college. They felt he should focus only on teaching and that research involved neglect of his duties as a teacher, in spite of Bose giving 26 hours of weekly lectures. Later, when interest was generated in the wider scientific community, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal proposed a research post to help Bose. But this scheme was withdrawn when Bose voted against the government's stance during a university meeting. The Lieutenant-Governor persevered to have a Rs.2500 annual grant issued. Despite this, Bose struggled to find time for research due to his teaching duties.
Bose submitted his first scientific paper, "On polarisation of electric rays by double-refracting crystals," to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in May 1895. He submitted his second paper, "On a new electro-polariscope," to the Royal Society of London in October 1895, and it was published by The Electrician in December 1895. This may have been the first paper to be published by an Indian in Western scientific periodicals.https://vigyanprasar.gov.in/bose-jagdish-chandra/ Bose Jagdish Chandra, igyanprasar.gov.in The paper described Bose's plans for a coherer, a term coined by Lodge referring to radio wave receivers, which he intended to "perfect" but never patented. The paper was well received by The Electrician and The Englishman, which in January 1896 (commenting on how this new type of wall- and fog-penetrating "invisible light" could be used in lighthouses) wrote:
In November 1895 at a public demonstration at the Town Hall of Kolkata, Bose showed how the millimetre range wavelength microwaves could travel through the human body (of Lieutenant Governor Sir William Mackenzie), and over a distance of 23 metres through two intervening walls to a trigger apparatus he had set up to ring a bell and ignite gunpowder in a closed room.Savneet kaur, Great Scientists of the World : Jagdish Chandra Bose, Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd - 2022, page 45Subal Kar, Physics and Astrophysics - Glimpses of the Progress, CRC Press · 2022, 1.5.4 - Fallout of Maxwell and Faraday's Electromagnetism
Wanting to meet other scientists in Europe, Bose was given a six month scientific deputation in 1896. Bose went to London on a lecture tour and met Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who had been developing a radio wave wireless telegraphy system for over a year and was trying to market it to the British post service. He was also congratulated by William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin and received an honorary Doctor of Science ( DSc) from the University of London. In an interview, Bose expressed his disinterest in commercial telegraphy and suggested others use his research work.
In 1899, Bose announced the development of an "iron-mercury-iron coherer with telephone detector" in a paper presented at the Royal Society, London.
In 1900, he presented his research at the first International Congress of Physics in Paris.
Place in radio development Bose's work in radio microwave optics was specifically directed towards studying the nature of the phenomenon and was not an attempt to develop radio into a communication medium.Sungook Hong, Wireless: From Marconi's Black-box to the Audion, MIT Press – 2001, page 199 His experiments took place during the same period (from late 1894 on) when Marconi was making breakthroughs on a radio system specifically designed for wireless telegraphySungook Hong, Wireless: From Marconi's Black-box to the Audion, MIT Press – 2001, page 21 and others were finding practical applications for radio waves, such as Russian physicist Alexander Stepanovich Popov's radio wave based lightning detector, also inspired by Lodge's experiment. Although Bose's work was not related to communication he, like Lodge and other laboratory experimenters, probably had an influence on other inventors trying to develop radio as communications medium. reprinted in Igor Grigorov, Ed., Antentop, Vol. 2, No.3, pp. 87–96.Sungook Hong, Wireless: From Marconi's Black-box to the Audion, MIT Press – 2001, page 22Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Real Inventor of Marconi's Wireless Receiver ; Varun Aggarwal, NSIT, Delhi, India Bose was not interested in patenting his work, and openly revealed the operation of his galena crystal detector in his lectures. A friend in the US persuaded him to take out a US patent on his detector, but he did not actively pursue it and allowed it to lapse.