Jacqueline Hochheiser, Corporate Communications
Jagadish Chandra Bose was an early Indian inventor who contributed to the development of radio communication. He predates the more advanced technology of Guglielmo Marconi who is presumed to have used J.C. Bose’s earlier model, known as the Coherer, as a starting point for his transmitter. Bose is also credited with discovering millimeter length electromagnetic waves and being a pioneer in the field of biophysics.
Bose also founded the Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of the oldest in the country. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research center in Asia, of which Bose served as the director from its inception until his death in November of 1937.
Early Life & Education
Bose was born on November 30th, 1858 in Mymensingh, Bengal Residency (present day Bangladesh) during the British governance of India. He was born to a Bengali Kayastha family (a Hindu caste that originated in the Bengal Region of the Indian Subcontinent), which was considered a well-to-do caste of society.
Bose was sent to a Bengali-language school for his early education instead of an English school. At the time, attending an English school was considered prestigious, and most children in Bose’s caste would attend them. However, Bose’s father wanted him to grow up speaking and learning in his native language. Tensions with British rule created a strong sense of nationalism and a need to ground in native culture.
Bose joined the Hare School in 1869, one of the oldest in Kolkata, India, that teaches grades one through twelve. He then attended SFX Greenherald International School, and later earned a BA from the University of Dhaka in 1879. For further education, Bose traveled to London to attend Christ’s College, Cambridge (a constituent college of the University of Cambridge) to study natural sciences.
Microwave & Radio Research
Bose’s first introduction to radio technology was after the 1894 publication of British physicist, Oliver Lodge and his demonstrations on how to transmit and direct radio waves. He began his own independent research in November 1894, setting up a small and primitive laboratory in his office where he worked as an officiating professor of physics at the Presidency College in London.
Bose’s goal was to study the light-like properties of radio waves, and ended up making significant contributions to the coherer, which was a primitive form of radio signal detector used in the first radio receivers during the wireless telegraphy era at the beginning of the 20th century. Since Bose’s objective was simply to study radio waves, and it was difficult to do so in their long-wave form, he found a way to shorten them to millimeter waves using the coherer technology.
The coherer is a two-terminal device whose resistance drops sharply with a direct or alternating voltage more than a given threshold. Coherers were built by enclosing metal filings (silver or nickel) in a tube along with electrodes. When the RF or direct signal was applied across the coherer, the filings cohered and the resistance dropped. The coherer was connected in series to a battery and the antenna that received the RF signal.
In 1894, Bose demonstrated this phenomenon at a public congregation at the Town Hall of Kolkata. The demonstration showed how the millimeter wavelength could travel through the human body and over a distance of 23 meters through two intervening walls to trigger an apparatus he had set up to ring a bell and ignite gunpowder.
Later Life
After the demonstration, the Indian government sent Bose on a lecture tour of England and Europe, where he performed the phenomenon with the coherer and his discoveries in front of audiences. It was thanks to a surgeon, Joseph Lister, who urged India’s government to build Bose a laboratory so he could better carry out more experiments, which gave rise to the Bose Institute.
Throughout the rest of his life, Bose continued to experiment, not only in the field of radio frequency, but many others as well. The ideas of natural science interested him and he was constantly trying to learn about new phenomena. While experimenting with the coherer, Bose witnessed something that would change the course of his career.
The coils inside his device appeared to exhibit fatigue in the form of a diminished sensitivity to radiation as his experiments went on. After being allowed to rest for a few hours, the instrument recovered its original potency, much like living tissue needed time to recovery after exertion. He concluded that organic muscle and inorganic metal responded similarly to stimuli. He believed that this blurred the accepted boundaries between the living and the nonliving. And so began his path into the field of biophysics, for which he became very well known.
As Bose gained recognition for his work in RF and biophysics in his later years, he continued to trave to Europe and the United States to lecture on his findings. He retired as a professor from the Presidency College in 1915 and was appointed Professor Emeritus. He spent his final years directing the Bose Institute and died in Giridih, India.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose
- https://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/jagadis-chandra-bose-1858-1937
- https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/sir-jagadis-chandra-bose-the-man-who-almost-invented-the-radio
- https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~murthy/sirjcbose.pdf
- https://themarconifamily.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/109978522/The%20Real%20Inventor%20of%20Marconi%27s%20Wireless%20Detector.pdf
You must be logged in to post a comment.