Great Personalities
Short biography of Jagdish Chandra Bose - Indian scientist
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, Jagdish 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 - for example S.N. Bose,
later to become well known for the Bose-Einstein
statistics
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 November
23, 1937, a week before his 80th birthday; hi s
ashes are in a shrine at the Bose Institute in
Calcutta.
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 polarization.
To receive
the radiation, he used a variety of differen!
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 1895 Bose gave his first public demonstration
of electromagnetic waves, using them to ring a bell
remotely and to explode some gun powder. In 1896
the Daily Chronicle of England reported: “The
inventor (J.C. Bose) has transmitted signals to a
distance of nearly a mile and here in 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 (millimeter-wave) experiments to
the Royal Institution and other societies in
England (8).
The wavelengths he used ranged from
2.5 cm to 5 mm. 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 1.2 cm atmospheric water vapor absorption line
was discovered during experimental radar work in
1944.
He was also known as an excellent teacher who
believed in the use of classroom demonstrations,
a trait apparently picked up while studying with
Lord Rayleigh at Cambridge. He influenced many
later Indian physicists, including Satyendra Bose
(no relation) who later went on to be an influential
figure in 20th century physics.
Later he turned his attention to plant physiology,
where he gained a new sort of fame with continued
claims that plants had nervous responses (of a sort)
similar to those of animals.
This led him to explore
the effects of drugs on plants, and later, non
organic materials such as metals, which he claimed
showed similar effects. Much of this was
demonstrated through the use of a device he
invented called the crescograph, which magnifieć
mechanical movements many times and allowed
for the direct study of plant growth.
Many of his instruments are still on display and
remain largely usable now, over 100 years later.
They include various antennas, polarizers, and
waveguides, all of which remain in use in modern
forms today.
Nature published about 27 papers written by him,
which is remarkable when compared to even the
greatest of the scientists.
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