Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose - Biography, Inventions and Achievements

Acharya Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a Bengali polymath, 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. He also invented the crescograph.

Born in Bikrampur (present day Munshiganj District near Dhaka in Bangladesh) 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 signalling 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. To facilitate his research, he constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements; these instruments produced some striking results, such as Bose’s demonstration of an apparent power of feeling in plants, exemplified by the quivering of injured plants. His books include Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902) and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926).

Inventions, Achievements and Facts about Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose

• Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in India in 1858. He received his education first in India, until in 1880 he went to England to study medicine at the University of London. Within a year he moved to Cambridge to take up a scholarship to study Natural Science at Christ's College Cambridge. 
• One of his lecturers at Cambridge was Professor Rayleigh, who clearly had a profound influence on his later work. In 1884 Bose was awarded a B.A. from Cambridge, but also a B.Sc. from London University. 
• Bose then returned to India, taking up a post initially as officiating professor of physics at the Presidency College in Calcutta. Following the example of Lord Rayleigh, Jagadish Bose made extensive use of scientific demonstrations in class; he is reported as being extraordinarily popular and effective as a teacher. 
• Many of his students at the Presidency College were destined to become famous in their own right.
• A book by Sir Oliver Lodge, "Heinrich Hertz and His Successors," impressed Bose. In 1894, J.C. Bose converted a small enclosure adjoining a bathroom in the Presidency College into a laboratory. He carried out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarisation. 
• To receive the radiation, he used a variety of different junctions connected to a highly sensitive galvanometer. He plotted in detail the voltage-current characteristics of his junctions, noting their non-linear characteristics. 
• He developed the use of galena crystals for making receivers, both for short wavelength radio waves and for white and ultraviolet light. Patent rights for their use in detecting electromagnetic radiation were granted to him in 1904. 
• In 1954 Pearson and Brattain gave priority to Bose for the use of a semi-conducting crystal as a detector of radio waves. Sir Neville Mott, Nobel Laureate in 1977 for his own contributions to solid-state electronics, remarked that "J.C. Bose was at least 60 years ahead of his time" and "In fact, he had anticipated the existence of P-type and N-type semiconductors."
• In the 19th century, when people considered plants as non living ‘thing’, it was all because of Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose that we came to know that plants too have feelings. Biography of Jagdish Chandra Bose is very interesting. 
• Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose was an eminent Indian scientist. He was the first to prove that plants too have life. He also invented wireless telegraphy a year before Marconi patented his invention.
• Jagdish Chandra Bose was born on November 30, 1858 in Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). His father Bhagabanchandra Bose was a Deputy Magistrate of Faridpur and also a respected leader of Brahmo Samaj. Jagdish Chandra Bose had his early education in Bengali, from village school. 
• In 1869, Jagdish Chandra Bose was sent to Calcutta to learn English and was educated at St. Xavier's School and College. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1879. He then went to England to study medicine at London University, but gave it up because of his own ill health. 
• He then studied Natural Science at Christchurch College, Cambridge and returned with a B.Sc. degree and Natural Science Tripos (a special course of study at Cambridge) in 1885.
• Upon his return, he was offered lecturership at Presidency College. As a teacher, Jagdish Chandra Bose was very popular and triggered the interest of his students by making extensive use of scientific demonstrations. In 1894, he decided to devote himself to pure research. 
• He converted a small enclosure adjoining a bathroom in the Presidency College into a laboratory. He carried out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarization. It would not be wrong to call him as the inventor of wireless telegraphy. 
• He also did his original scientific work in Microwaves. According to history of He was able to generate extremely short waves and achieved considerable improvement in Hertz’s detector of electric waves. J. C. Bose designed a compact apparatus for generating electromagnetic waves and studying their quasi-optical properties such as refraction, polarization and double refraction.
• In 1895, a year before Marconi patented this invention; Jagdish Chandra Bose had publicly demonstrated electromagnetic waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder. He later switched from physics to the study of metals and then plants. He fabricated a highly sensitive ‘coherer’, a device that detects radio waves. 
• He found that the sensitivity of the coherer decreased when it was used continuously for a long period and it regained its sensitivity when he gave the device some rest. Finding that a universal reaction brought together metals, plants and animals under a common law, he next proceeded to 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, stupefied 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.’
• In 1895 Bose gave his first public demonstration of electromagnetic waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder. In 1896 the Daily Chronicle of England reported: "The inventor (J.C. Bose) has transmitted signals to a distance of nearly a mile and herein lies the first and obvious and exceedingly valuable application of this new theoretical marvel." Popov in Russia was doing similar experiments, but had written in December 1895 that he was still entertaining the hope of remote signalling with radio waves. The first successful wireless signalling experiment by Marconi on Salisbury Plain in England was not until May 1897. The 1895 public demonstration by Bose in Calcutta predates all these experiments. Invited by Lord Rayleigh, in 1897 Bose reported on his microwave (millimetre-wave) experiments to the Royal Institution and other societies in England . 
• The wavelengths he used ranged from 2.5cm to 5mm. In his presentation to the Royal Institution in January 1897 Bose speculated on the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the sun, suggesting that either the solar or the terrestrial atmosphere might be responsible for the lack of success so far in detecting such radiation - solar emission was not detected until 1942, and the 1.2cm atmospheric water vapour absorption line was discovered during experimental radar work in 1944. 
• By about the end of the 19th century, the interests of Bose turned away from electromagnetic waves to response phenomena in plants; this included studies of the effects of electromagnetic radiation on plants, a topical field today. 
• He retired from the Presidency College in 1915, but was appointed Professor Emeritus. Two years later the Bose Institute was founded. Bose was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920. He died in 1937, a week before his 80th birthday; his ashes are in a shrine at the Bose Institute in Calcutta.

Quotes by Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose

• I hope that the institution will succeed in maximizing students' potential in the same way. I will give all of my stock to this institution. It will own the Bose Corporation and be funded by the Bose Corporation.
• The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.
• The road to success is not to be run upon by seven-leagued boots. Step by step, little by little, bit by bit that is the way to wealth, that is the way to wisdom, that is the way to glory.
• There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals
• Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
• We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
• As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can't remember the other two...
• Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone.