Jagadish Chandra Bose

Indian physicist

• Born: November 30, 1858; Mymensingh, Bengal, British India (now Bangladesh)
• Died: November 23, 1937; Giridih, Bengal, British India (now Bangladesh)

An Indian polymath whose work focused on physics, physiology, and education, Jagadish Chandra Bose flourished between the 1890s and the 1930s. He researched electromagnetism and created devices that advanced the development of radio and pioneered biophysics by exploring the reactions of plants, animals, and inorganic materials to various stimuli.

Primary field: Physics

Specialties: Electromagnetism; physiology; biophysics

Early Life

Jagadish Chandra Bose (BOHS) was one of two sons born to Bhagawan Chandra Bose (also known as Bhagaban) and Banasundari Devi (also known as Bama Sundari). His brother died at the age of ten. Both parents were Brahmo—a casteless, monotheistic, quasi-religious nationalist movement that sprang up during the British occupation of India. The educational and egalitarian aspects of the sect attracted Bose as a youth. His father was a high-level civil servant for the British government. Bose spent his childhood in Faridpur, where his father was serving as a deputy magistrate.

Bose began his education at a local pathasala or vernacular school, where he learned Bengali and read the ancient Indian epics known as the Mahabharata and Ramayana. At the age of eleven, he was sent to Calcutta (now Kolkata), where, after a brief stay at Hare School, he enrolled at St. Xavier’s College, a Jesuit preparatory institution. At St. Xavier’s, Bose came under the influence of Eugene Lafont, a science teacher who encouraged his budding interests in experimental mathematics, physics and astronomy.

Although he passed a physical science exam in 1879 that qualified him for a bachelor’s degree at Calcutta University, Bose wanted to continue his scientific education in England. By this time, however, his father had lost his savings on various investment schemes and was suffering from poor health. He could not afford to send his son abroad. Bose decided to stay in India. He joined the civil service and made plans to become a lawyer. However, his mother insisted that he follow his original dream. She sold valuable jewelry inherited from her family to pay for her son’s passage to England.

Life’s Work

Bose enrolled at the University of London in 1881, intending to study medicine. After his arrival, he suffered several bouts of malaria that put him behind in his coursework. After a year, Bose transferred to Cambridge University’s Christ’s College to concentrate on natural sciences. Bose took courses from such renowned teachers as physicist and 1904 Nobel laureate Lord Rayleigh John William Strutt, physiologist Sir Michael Foster, botanist Sidney Vines, and botanist Sir Francis “Frank” Darwin, the son of naturalist Charles Darwin. In 1884, Bose earned a BA in natural sciences from Cambridge University and a BS degree from the University of London.

The following year Bose returned to his homeland with a letter of recommendation from the late Henry Fawcett—a blind academic, economist, and politician—to George Robinson (Lord Ripon), who was then the British viceroy of India. Lord Ripon sponsored Bose for the Imperial Educational Service, and Bose became the first native Indian to be named professor of physics at Presidency College in Calcutta. Thanks to Lord Ripon’s influence, Bose was appointed to the position despite the objections of Sir Alfred Croft, the director of public instruction in Bengal, and Charles R. Tawney, the principal of the college. Bose was offered half the salary of British teachers, which he considered an insult. He refused to accept any pay at all. Bose taught for three years—during which time he married Abala Das, daughter of a Calcutta judiciary and political leader—without compensation before Croft and Tawney admitted his worth and raised his salary to the level of other teachers. Bose received his back wages in a lump sum and used the money to pay his father’s outstanding debts.

The college gave Bose a small office in which he performed his research. During the early 1890s, he designed various instruments to produce, detect, and measure electromagnetic waves and microwaves, and he published numerous papers on his work. In the early 1900s, he examined the phenomenon of metal fatigue and explored comparative physiology through testing the responses of plants, animals, and inorganic materials, creating devices as needed to record microscopic movement and growth.

In 1896, Bose began receiving international recognition for his work. He was invited to England, where the University of London awarded him a doctorate. Bose was granted the singular honor of presenting a lecture and demonstration, “On the Polarisation of Electric Rays,” for the Friday Evening Discourse, which eminent physicist Michael Faraday had begun in 1826 at the Royal Institution in London. Bose’s papers on the subject were published in the institution’s Transactions, and in a leading British journal, the Electrician. Bose visited Paris and Berlin to discuss his research and findings with leading physicists.

Bose presented “On the Similarity of Responses of Inorganic and Living Matter,” at the Paris International Congress of Physicists in 1900. The next year, he gave a similar presentation at his second Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution. The institution’s Davy-Faraday Laboratory was put at his disposal to conduct further experiments to prove his theories regarding living and non-living responses to stimuli. After two years in England, and despite receiving offers to teach at British universities, Bose returned to India.

Bose remained at Presidency College for thirty years, teaching physics and conducting experiments throughout his tenure, until his retirement in 1915—after which he was given professor emeritus status with full pay. Active throughout his career, he accompanied several scientific deputations to Europe and the United States (1907, 1914, and 1919), was a member of the League of Nations International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, and served as president of the Indian Science Congress in 1927.

Bose received numerous honors during his lifetime, including being named Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (1903) and Commander of the Star of India (1911). He was granted knighthood in 1916 and in 1920 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Science, the first Indian to be so honored. In 1917, he founded the Bose Institute in Calcutta, the first modern facility in India established to conduct research in various related scientific fields. Bose served as director of the institute and continued various scientific investigations until his death in 1937, one week before his seventy-ninth birthday.

Impact

One of the individuals most responsible for the surge in modern scientific research in India, Bose was known not only for the breadth of his studies, but also for the depth of his character.

A multitude of subjects besides those he specialized in—electromagnetism and plant physiology—occupied Bose’s curiosity, from archaeology to literature. In 1896, he published one of the first works of science fiction in the Bengali language, “Runaway Cyclone,” a story involving weather control and hair oil. His fiction and nonfiction concerning natural phenomena were collected in a volume entitled Abyakta (which means, translated, “inarticulate” or “unexpressed”).

A particularly remarkable aspect of Bose’s work is his disdain for self-aggrandizement or personal wealth. His investigations were conducted as purely scientific endeavors, and he refused lucrative offers to develop devices from several equipment manufacturers. Few of his inventions (now on display at the Bose Institute Museum) were patented, because Bose, a staunch advocate for the free exchange of knowledge, readily made the processes of his experiments and the designs of the instruments he created available to fellow scientists.

Bose’s longest-lasting legacy is the research institute he established in 1917. Now a world-class multidisciplinary facility, Bose Institute has produced legions of scholars who have followed the founder’s example, advancing human knowledge by conducting original and groundbreaking experiments in such diverse fields as astrophysics, quantum mechanics, microbiology, biochemistry, molecular and cellular genetics, animal physiology, immunology, and environmental science.

Bibliography

Franklin, Jerrold. Classical Electromagnetism. Boston: Addison, 2005. Print. Illustrated textbook that details the history and theories behind the electricity and magnetism contained in one of the fundamental forces in the universe, which served as the primary field of study for Bose’s earliest experiments.

Gosling, David L. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Offers an illustrated examination of the cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and technological effects arising from the introduction of modern science into India.

Mukhopadhyay, Ashim Kumar, ed. Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose in Modern Review. Kolkata: Progressive, 2011. Print. Features content by and about Bose published between 1907 and 1975 in Modern Review, an English-language monthly magazine aimed at an audience of Indian intellectuals.

Sarkar, Tapan K., et al. History of Wireless. Hoboken: Wiley, 2006. Print. Features an illustrated examination of the development of wireless technology, focusing on the personalities of the many individuals—such as Bose—who contributed to the evolution of a science with countless applications in the modern world.

Sen Gupta, D. P., Meher H. Engineer, and V. A. Shepherd. Remembering Sir J. C. Bose. Singapore: World Scientific, 2009. Print. Presents an illustrated biography detailing the events of the scientist’s life, discussing his work ethic and spiritual background, and recapping his many accomplishments.