Acharya Sir. Jagdish Chandra Bose

Life and Education:

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in Bikrampur, Bengal, (now Munshiganj District of Bangladesh) on 30 November 1858. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was a Brahmo and leader of the Brahmo Samaj and worked as a deputy magistrate/ assistant commissioner in Faridpur, Bardhaman and other places. His family hailed from the village Rarikhal, Bikrampur, in the current day Munshiganj District of Bangladesh. Bose joined the Hare School in 1869 and then St. Xavier's School at Kolkata. In 1875, he passed the Entrance Examination (equivalent to school graduation) of University of Calcutta and was admitted to St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. At St. Xavier's, Bose came in contact with Jesuit Father Eugene Lafont, who played a significant role in developing his interest to natural science. He received a bachelor's degree from University of Calcutta in 1879.

Bose wanted to go to England to compete for the Indian Civil Service. However, his father, a civil servant himself, cancelled the plan. He wished his son to be a scholar, who would “rule nobody but himself. Bose went to England to study Medicine at the University of London. However, he had to quit because of ill health. The odour in the dissection rooms is also said to have exacerbated his illness.Through the recommendation of Anandamohan Bose, his brother-in-law (sister's husband) and the first Indian wrangler, he secured admission in Christ's College, Cambridge to study Natural Science. He received the Natural Science Tripos from the University of Cambridge and a BSc from the University of London in 1884. Among Bose's teachers at Cambridge were Lord Rayleigh, Michael Foster, James Dewar, Francis Darwin, Francis Balfour, and Sidney Vines. At the time when Bose was a student at Cambridge, Prafulla Chandra Roy was a student at Edinburgh. They met in London and became intimate friends.

 Later he was married to Abala Bose, the renowned feminist, and social worker.On the second day of a two-day seminar held on the occasion of 150th anniversary of Jagadish Chandra Bose on 28–29 July at The Asiatic Society, Kolkata Professor Shibaji Raha, Director of the Bose Institute, Kolkata told in his valedictory address that he had personally checked the register of the Cambridge University to confirm the fact that in addition to Tripos he received an MA as well from it in 1884.

Bose returned to India in 1885, carrying a letter from Fawcett, the economist to Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India. On Lord Ripon's request, Sir Alfred Croft, the Director of Public Instruction, appointed Bose officiating professor of physics in Presidency College. The principal, C. H. Tawney, protested against the appointment but had to accept it.Bose was not provided with facilities for research. On the contrary, he was a 'victim of racialism' with regard to his salary. In those days, an Indian professor was paid Rs. 200 per month, while his European counterpart received Rs. 300 per month. Since Bose was officiating, he was offered a salary of only Rs. 100 per month. As a form of protest, Bose refused to accept the salary cheque and continued his teaching assignment for three years without accepting any salary. After time, the Director of Public Instruction and the Principal of the Presidency College relented, and Bose's appointment was made permanent with retrospective effect. He was given the full salary for the previous three years in a lump sum.

Presidency College lacked a proper laboratory. Bose had to conduct his research in a small 24-square-foot (2.2 m2) room. He devised equipment for the research with the help of one untrained tinsmith. After his daily grind, he carried out his research far into the night, in a small room in his college.Moreover, the policy of the British government for its colonies was not conducive to attempts at original research. Bose spent his own money for making experimental equipment.

Contribution to Science:

Bose carried on with his research at Presidency College inspite of depressing circumstances like non-existent research facilities and related paraphernalia, discouraging snubs from superiors and decrepit infrastructure, to name a few. His lab was a small enclosureadjoining a bathroom. He would stay on in his lab long after the classes were over. He met expenses for the experiments himself and even fabricated the equipment using his sheer ingenuity. It was in such surroundings that a device for producing electromagneticwaves was invented by Bose.

In 1894, Bose rang a bell and exploded a small charge of gunpowder using electromagnetic waves demonstrating to general public how the electromagnetic waves could be used for many useful applications. His invention was appreciated by the science community for the compact nature of the apparatus and sheer resourcefulness with which the equipment was designed. It became a favourite content for many textbooks of the contemporary period. Bose also developed the use of Galena crystals for making receivers, both for shortwave length radio waves and for white and ultraviolet light. Sir Neville Mott, 1977 Nobel Prize winner admitted, “… J. C. Bose was at least sixty years ahead of his time.... In fact, he had anticipated the existence of P-type and N-type semiconductors.” Bose also worked on the polarization of electric waves by double refraction.

London University conferred on him D. Sc. Degree in 1896 for his thesis on “Measurements of Electric Rays”. Bose also speculated on theexistence of electromagnetic radiation from the sun. Two years later, Bose demonstrated another invention—the Mercury Coherer with the telephone detector. Bose can also be considered a pioneer in the field of ‘investigation of the properties of photoconductivity’ and ‘contact rectification shown by this class of semi-conductors’. His subsequent study of the fatigue phenomena exhibited by these substances led Bose to postulate his theory of the similarity of response in the living and the nonliving. He found that the sensitivity of the coherer decreased when it was used for a long period, i.e. it became tired. When he gave the device some rest, it regained its sensitivity which, in his view, indicated that metals hadfeelings and memory! During 1897-1900, Bose turned his interest to Comparative Physiology, Plant Physiology in particular.

The main focus of his investigations was to establish that all the characteristics of response exhibited by animal tissues were equally exhibited by plant tissues. Bose’s highly original research on ‘Electric Response of Inorganic Substances’ was initially rejected due to opposition of Sir John Burdon Sanderson, the leading electro-physiologist of the time. However, Bose’s interest in Physiology gave an impetus to his inventive genius, leading to invention of an optical lever in plant physiology to magnify and photographically record the minute movements of plants.

He perfected the resonant recorder that enabled him to determine with remarkable accuracy, the latent period of response of the touch-me-not plant (Mimosa Pudica) which was a thousandth part of a second.

Accolades:

Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE,1903)

Companion of the Order of the Star of India (CSI,1912)

Knight Bachelor (1917)

Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS, 1920)

Member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, 1928

President of the 14th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1927.

Member of Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters in 1929.

Member of the League of Nations' Committee for Intellectual Cooperation

Founding fellow of the National Institute of Sciences of India (now the Indian National Science Academy)

The Indian Botanic Garden was renamed as the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden on 25 June 2009 in honor of Jagadish Chandra Bose.

Made by- Shubham.G

( 8th M , Roll no.28 )