Person · physicist & plant physiologist
Jagadish Chandra Bose
Also known as J. C. Bose, Jagadis Chandra Bose, Acharya Bose
Bengali physicist who generated and detected millimetre-wave radio at Presidency College in 1895, demonstrating wireless transmission through walls a year before Marconi's patent, and who invented the iron-mercury coherer. He then turned to plant electrophysiology and built instruments to measure growth to a ten-thousandth of a millimetre.
- Date
- 1858 – 1937
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Tradition
- Royal Society papers; Bose Institute records
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He refused on principle to patent his work, saying discoveries should belong to everyone, and was paid a third of a European colleague's salary at Presidency until he refused the salary altogether for three years until the college relented and paid the arrears in full.
Connections (2)
- Monastic foundationCalcutta Botanic Garden
Bose demonstrated millimetre-wave radio at Calcutta in 1895, transmitting through walls to ring a bell and fire a charge in another room, and published the work in the Royal Society's proceedings the following year. He declined to patent it. He founded the Bose Institute in 1917 to do fundamental research in India rather than sending students abroad, and ran it on the argument that colonial science had no monopoly on original work.
- Court associationRabindranath Tagore
Bose and Tagore were close friends for forty years, and Tagore raised money for his laboratory and wrote about his plant experiments. The two belong to the same Bengali argument — that Indians should do original work in Bengali institutions rather than take instruction from imported ones — which produced Śāntiniketan, the Bose Institute and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science within one generation.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jagadish Chandra Bose”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
Open Jagadish Chandra Bose in the repository →