Jagadish Chandra Bose

Name	আচার্য জগদীশ চন্দ্র বসুAcharyo-Jogodiish-Chondro-BoshūAcharya Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, CSI, CIE, FRS
Caption	Jagadish Chandra Bose in Royal Institution, London
Birth date	November 30, 1858
Birth place	Bikrampur, Bengal Presidency, British India
Death date	November 23, 1937
Death place	Giridih, Bengal, British India
Alma mater	St. Xavier's College, CalcuttaUniversity of Cambridge
Residence	Kolkata, Bengal, British India
Nationality	Bangladeshi, Indian
Field	Physics, Biophysics, Biology, Botany, Archaeology, Bengali Literature, Bangla Science Fiction
Work institution	University of CalcuttaUniversity of CambridgeUniversity of London
Doctoral advisor	John Strutt (Lord Rayleigh)
Notable students	Satyendra Nath Bose
Known for	Millimetre waves RadioCrescograph Plant science
Religion	Buddhism
Prizes	Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) (1903)Companion of the Order of the Star of India (CSI) (1911)Knight Bachelor (1917)

Acharya Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, CSI, CIE, FRS ( Jôgodish Chôndro Boshu) (30 November 1858 – 23 November 1937) was a Bengali polymath: a physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist, as well as an early writer of science fiction. He pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent. IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science. He is also considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He was the first person from the Indian subcontinent to receive a US patent, in 1904.

Born during the British Raj, Bose graduated from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. He then went to the University of London to study medicine, but could not pursue studies in medicine due to health problems. Instead, he conducted his research with the Nobel Laureate Lord Rayleigh at Cambridge and returned to India. He then joined the Presidency College of 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 remarkable progress in his research of remote wireless signaling and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio signals. However, instead of trying to gain commercial benefit from this invention Bose made his inventions public in order to allow others to further develop his research.

Bose subsequently made a number of pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli, and thereby scientifically proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues. Although Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions due to peer pressure, his reluctance to any form of patenting was well known.

He has been recognised for his many contributions to modern science.

Early life and education

Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose was born in Bikrampur, Bengal, now Munshiganj District of Bangladesh) on November 30, 1870. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was a Brahmo and leader of the Brahmo Samaj and worked as a deputy magistrate/ assistant commissioner in Faridpur, Bardhaman and other places. His family hailed from the village Rarikhal, Bikrampur, in the current day Munshiganj District of Bangladesh.

Bose’s education started in a vernacular school, because his father believed that one must know one's own mother tongue before beginning English, and that one should know also one's own people. Speaking at the Bikrampur Conference in 1915, Bose said: : “At that time, sending children to English schools was an aristocratic status symbol. In the vernacular school, to which I was sent, the son of the Muslim attendant of my father sat on my right side, and the son of a fisherman sat on my left. They were my playmates. I listened spellbound to their stories of birds, animals and aquatic creatures. Perhaps these stories created in my mind a keen interest in investigating the workings of Nature. When I returned home from school accompanied by my school fellows, my mother welcomed and fed all of us without discrimination. Although she was an orthodox old fashioned lady, she never considered herself guilty of impiety by treating these ‘untouchables’ as her own children. It was because of my childhood friendship with them that I could never feel that there were ‘creatures’ who might be labelled ‘low-caste’. I never realised that there existed a ‘problem’ common to the two communities, Hindus and Muslims.” The odour in the dissection rooms is also said to have exacerbated his illness. Among Bose’s teachers at Cambridge were Lord Rayleigh, Michael Foster, James Dewar, Francis Darwin, Francis Balfour, and Sidney Vines. At the time when Bose was a student at Cambridge, Prafulla Chandra Roy was a student at Edinburgh. They met in London and became intimate friends.

Bose was not provided with facilities for research. On the contrary, he was a ‘victim of racialism’ with regard to his salary. With remarkable sense of self respect and national pride he decided on a new form of protest. Finally both the Director of Public Instruction and the Principal of the Presidency College fully realised the value of Bose’s skill in teaching and also his lofty character. As a result his appointment was made permanent with retrospective effect. He was given the full salary for the previous three years in a lump sum.

The first remarkable aspect of Bose’s follow up microwave research was that he reduced the waves to the millimetre level (about 5 mm wavelength). He realised the disadvantages of long waves for studying their light-like properties. One year later, during a November 1894 (or 1895

Bose’s first scientific paper, “On polarisation of electric rays by double-refracting crystals” was communicated to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in May 1895, within a year of Lodge’s paper. His second paper was communicated to the Royal Society of London by Lord Rayleigh in October 1895. In December 1895, the London journal the Electrician (Vol 36) published Bose’s paper, “On a new electro-polariscope”. At that time, the word ‘coherer’, coined by Lodge, was used in the English-speaking world for Hertzian wave receivers or detectors. The Electrician readily commented on Bose’s coherer. (December 1895). The Englishman (18 January 1896) quoted from the Electrician and commented as follows: :”Should Professor Bose succeed in perfecting and patenting his ‘Coherer’, we may in time see the whole system of coast lighting throughout the navigable world revolutionised by a Bengali scientist working single handed in our Presidency College Laboratory.” Bose planned to “perfect his coherer” but never thought of patenting it.

Bose's demonstration of remote wireless signalling has priority over Marconi. He was the first to use a semiconductor junction to detect radio waves, and he invented various now commonplace microwave components. In 1954, Pearson and Brattain gave priority to Bose for the use of a semi-conducting crystal as a detector of radio waves. Further work at millimetre wavelengths was almost nonexistent for nearly 50 years. In 1897, Bose described to the Royal Institution in London his research carried out in Kolkata at millimetre wavelengths. He used waveguides, horn antennas, dielectric lenses, various polarisers and even semiconductors at frequencies as high as 60 GHz; much of his original equipment is still in existence, now at the Bose Institute in Kolkata. A 1.3 mm multi-beam receiver now in use on the NRAO 12 Metre Telescope, Arizona, U.S.A. incorporates concepts from his original 1897 papers. validates this skepticism. Canny experimentally demonstrated pumping in the living cells in the junction of the endodermis.

In his research in plant stimuli, Bose showed with the help of his newly invented crescograph that plants responded to various stimuli as if they had nervous systems like that of animals. He therefore found a parallelism between animal and plant tissues. His experiments showed that plants grow faster in pleasant music and their growth is retarded in noise or harsh sound. This was experimentally verified later on.

His major contribution in the field of biophysics was the demonstration of the electrical nature of the conduction of various stimuli (e.g., wounds, chemical agents) in plants, which were earlier thought to be of a chemical nature. These claims were later proven experimentally by Wildon et al. (Nature, 1992, 360, 62–65). He was also the first to study the action of microwaves in plant tissues and corresponding changes in the cell membrane potential. He researched the mechanism of the seasonal effect on plants, the effect of chemical inhibitors on plant stimuli, the effect of temperature etc. From the analysis of the variation of the cell membrane potential of plants under different circumstances, he deduced the claim that plants can "feel pain, understand affection etc.".

Electrical response in metals

J.C. Bose was the first physicist who began an examination of inorganic matter (metals and certain rocks) in the same way as a biologist examines a muscle or a nerve. He subjected metals to various kinds of stimulus—mechanical, thermal, chemical, and electrical. He found that all sorts of stimulus produce an excitatory change in them. And this excitation sometimes expresses itself in a visible change of form and sometimes not; but the disturbance produced by the stimulus always exhibits itself in an electric response. He next subjected plants and animal tissues to various kinds of stimulus and also found that they also give an electric response. Finding that a universal reaction brought together metals, plants and animals under a common law, he next proceeded to a study of modifications in response, which occur under various conditions. He found that they are all(metals and living tissues) benumbed by cold, intoxicated by alcohol, wearied by excessive work, stupified by anaesthetics, excited by electric currents, stung by physical blows and killed by poison—they all exhibit essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression, together with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation, yet also that of permanent irresponsiveness which is associated with death—they all are responsive or irresponsive under the same conditions and in the same manner. The investigations showed that, in the entire range of response phenomena (inclusive as that is of metals, plants and animals) there is no breach of continuity; that “the living response in all its diverse modifications is only a repetition of responses seen in the inorganic” and that the phenomena of response “are determined, not by the play of an unknowable and arbitrary vital force, but by the working of laws that know no change, acting equally and uniformly throughout the organic and inorganic matter.”

Science fiction

In 1896, Bose wrote Niruddesher Kahini, the first major work in Bangla science fiction. Later, he added the story in the Abyakta book as Palatak Tuphan. He was the first science fiction writer in the Bengali language.

Bose and patents

The inventor of "Wireless Telecommunications", Bose was not interested in patenting his invention. In his Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution, London, he made public his construction of the coherer. Thus The Electric Engineer expressed "surprise that no secret was at anytime made as to its construction, so that it has been open to all the world to adopt it for practical and possibly moneymaking purposes."

Notes

References and general information

;Books

Frontiers in Biophysics, Vol. 6. Chapter "The ascent of sap", pp. 11–14.

Davies, E., in The Biochemistry of Plants, Academic Press, 1987b, vol. 12, pp. 243–264.

J.M. Payne & P.R. Jewell, "The Upgrade of the NRAO 8-beam Receiver," in Multi-feed Systems for Radio Telescopes, D.T. Emerson & J.M. Payne, Eds. San Francisco: ASP Conference Series, 1995, vol. 75, p. 144

Fleming, J. A. (1908). The principles of electric wave telegraphy. London: New York and.

;Journals

;Papers and essays

Varun Aggarwal, Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Real Inventor of Marconi’s Wireless Receiver

A versatile genius, Frontline 21 (24), 2004.

Further reading

The life and work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose by Patrick Geddes, Longmans London, 1920

External links

Bose Institute Website

Biography at Calcuttaweb

SIR JAGADISH CHANDRA BOSE: the unsung Hero of Radio Communication at web.mit.edu J. C. Bose, The Unsung hero of radio communication

JC Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s

Science Magazine on Bose priority

Article on Jagadish Chandra Bose, Banglapedia

IEEEGHN: Jagadish Chandra Bose at www.ieeeghn.org ECIT Bose article at www.infinityfoundation.com

INSA publication

Radio history

Vigyan Prasar article

Frontline article

Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose at www.vigyanprasar.gov.in (Project Gutenberg) (Project Gutenberg)

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