| Sir Jagadish Chandra
Bose |
 |
1858-1937
Jagadish
Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858, in Myemsingh, Faridpur, a
part of the Dhaka District now in Bangladesh. He attended the village
school till he was 11. He then moved to Kolkata where he enrolled in
St. Xavier’s. He was very much interested in Biology. However, Father
Lafont, a famous Professor of Physics, inspired in Bose a great
interest
in Physics.
Having obtained his
B.A. in physical sciences, twenty two year old Bose left for London,
to obtain a medical degree. However, he kept falling illand had to
discontinue his plans to be a doctor. He then obtained his B.A.degree
from Christ College, Cambridge.
He returned to
India in 1885 and joined Presidency College, Kolkata as an Assistant
Professor of Physics, where he remained till 1915. There was a
peculiar practice in the college at that time. The Indian teachers in
the college were paid one third of what the British teachers were
paid! So Bose refused his salary but worked for three years. The
fourth year he was paid in full! He was an excellent teacher,
extensively using scientific demonstrations in class. Some of his
students, such as S. N. Bose went on to become famous physicists
themselves.
During this period, Bose also started
doing original scientific work in the area of microwaves, carrying
out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarization.
He developed the use of galena crystals for making receivers, both
for short wavelength radio waves and for white and ultraviolet light.
In 1895, two years before Marconi’s demonstration, Bose demonstrated
wireless communication using radio waves, using them to ring a bell
remotely
and to explode some gunpowder.
Many of the microwave components familiar today - waveguides, horn
antennas, polarizers, dielectric lenses and prisms, and even
semiconductor detectors of electromagnetic radiation - were invented
and used by Bose in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He
also suggested the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the
Sun, which was confirmed in 1944. Bose then turned his attention to
response phenomena in plants. He showed that not only animal but
vegetable tissues, produce similar electric response under different
kinds of stimuli – mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical. Bose
was knighted in 1917 and soon thereafter elected Fellow of the Royal
Society, London, (both as physicist and biologist!). Bose had worked
all along without the right kind of scientific instruments and
laboratory. For a long time he had been thinking of building a
laboratory. The result was the establishment of the Bose Research
Institute in Kolkata. It continues to be a famous centre of research
in basic sciences. Source: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
(http://www.tifr.res.in/~outreach/biographies/scientists.pdf)
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