Jagadish Chandra Bose: Radio Pioneer and Plant Physiologist

Bose was a Bengali scientist, born in 1858. His early life mixed village schooling, a failed attempt at medicine, and a hard start as a teacher.

1. Where did Bose grow up, and what shaped him?

Bose was born on 30 November 1858 in Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was a Deputy Collector. The family’s old home was in Rarikhal village in Bikrampur, near Dhaka.

His father chose a village school in Faridpur, not an English one. Bose learned his mother tongue there. He sat beside the children of farmers and fishermen. He also loved village folk plays and the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

2. How did he get from medicine to physics?

Bose first went to England to study medicine, but ill health forced him to stop. He then joined Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study natural sciences. In 1884 he earned a Cambridge BA and a London University BSc.

Earlier, at St Xavier’s College in Calcutta, Father Lafont had sparked his interest in physical science. He passed the university entrance test in 1875 and took his BA in 1879.

3. Why was his first job so hard?

Back in India, Bose became Assistant Professor of Physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. He was paid less than his European colleagues. The college had no real research laboratory.

Bose worked in a tiny room of about 24 square feet. He built his first instruments with the help of an untrained tinsmith. Sister Nivedita wrote that she was horrified by the daily petty difficulties he faced.

Radio waves are electromagnetic waves. They carry signals without wires. Bose studied them in his small laboratory and then showed them to the public.

4. What did his first experiments show?

In 1894 Bose began a series of experiments on electric waves. He showed that they behave like light. They reflect, bend, polarise and diffract.

His results appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and the Philosophical Magazine. London University gave him a DSc degree in 1896 for this work.

5. What happened in the 1895 demonstration?

In 1895 Bose sent radio waves through two walls to ring a bell and set off gunpowder. The distance was 23 metres. The IEEE, the world body of electrical engineers, places this at Presidency College, Calcutta.

The waves were at 60 GHz. That is a very high frequency, in the millimetre-wave range. Gigahertz (GHz) measures billions of wave cycles each second. In 1896 England’s Daily Chronicle praised the work.

6. Which instruments did Bose build for it?

Bose built the whole set of parts for his system. These include a spark transmitter, a coherer, a dielectric lens, a polariser, a horn antenna and a cylindrical diffraction grating. A coherer is a detector that picks up radio waves.

He used wavelengths from 2.5 centimetres down to 5 millimetres. This suited his small laboratory. Modern radio links still use the same ideas, in updated form.

7. Did Bose beat Marconi, and did he patent his work?

Bose showed wireless waves in London in January 1897. Marconi’s Salisbury Plain tests came in May 1897. So Bose was earlier in public, but the two men aimed at different things.

Marconi built a commercial wireless business and fought patent suits. Bose rarely thought of profit. Even so, he did take one US patent, in 1904, and the portal calls him the first Asian to do so.

Bose moved from radio to living things. His tools were the same: sensitive detectors and careful measurement.

8. How did radio work lead him to plants?

His coherer tired after use and recovered after rest. Bose saw the same pattern in living tissue. This led him to study how living and non-living things respond to a push.

From 1899 to 1907 he tested animal and plant tissue and some metals. He used electricity, heat, drugs, chemicals and mechanical strain. He wrote up the results in his 1902 book, Response in the Living and Non-Living.

9. What is the crescograph?

The crescograph is an instrument that magnifies tiny movements. Banglapedia says it could magnify them ten million times. Bose used it to measure how fast a plant grows and how it reacts to a stimulus.

His other instruments included a conductivity balance, a transpirograph and a photosynthetic recorder. His 1926 book, The Nervous Mechanism of Plants, was dedicated to the poet Rabindranath Tagore.

10. How did other scientists receive his plant work?

The reception was mixed. When Bose died, Nature said the true value of his work in physiology could not yet be judged. Historians still argue about it.

Peter Minorsky argues that the American botanist Daniel MacDougal attacked Bose with racist tropes, not with science. Naomi Kingsland and Lincoln Taiz dispute how history is used here. Treat this as a live debate.

Bose left an institute, a string of honours and a lasting name in science.

11. Why did he found the Bose Institute?

Bose founded the Bose Institute in Kolkata and dedicated it to the nation on his 60th birthday, 30 November 1917. He called it not merely a laboratory but a temple. Its aims were to advance science and spread knowledge.

He had retired from Presidency College in 1915 and directed the institute until his death. Today it is an autonomous body under the Department of Science and Technology.

12. Which honours did he receive?

Banglapedia says he was knighted in 1916. In 1920 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1928 he became a corresponding member of the Vienna Academy of Science.

He presided over the 1927 Indian Science Congress. He also sat on a League of Nations committee on intellectual cooperation. He was a foundation Fellow of the National Institute of Sciences of India, now the Indian National Science Academy.

13. How is Bose remembered today?

Bose died on 23 November 1937, aged 78, a few days before his 79th birthday. The IEEE called his millimetre-wave work a Milestone, dedicated on 15 September 2012 at Kolkata. It is the oldest Milestone from Asia.

The Indian Botanic Garden at Shibpur was renamed after him in 2009. A crater on the Moon carries his name.

Questions on him test names, inventions and institutions. Learn the pairs below.

14. Which pairs and traps should you remember?

Match each name to its work. Jagadish Chandra Bose goes with radio waves, the crescograph and the Bose Institute. Satyendra Nath Bose goes with the boson.

Bose’s wireless demonstration in 1895 was at Presidency College. The Bose Institute opened in 1917. His plant book of 1926 was dedicated to Tagore. The crescograph is for plants, not for radio.