Despite being free people for more than 60 years now, Indians are yet to develop the tradition of remembering and honouring their great savants of pre-Independence times. One example of such neglect relates to Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937), arguably the first ‘modern’ scientist to have emerged from India. This year marks the 150th birth anniversary of JC Bose, who made seminal scientific discoveries and technological inventions at the world level, in two seemingly unconnected areas of science and technology—electromagnetism and plant physiology. This was unique for a modern scientist.

In 1895, Bose successfully demonstrated in public in colonial Calcutta the wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves. Generating waves using a self-designed and built transmitter at one end of a link and sending them to a similarly built detector located 75 feet away, through intervening obstacles such as the body of Lieutenant General Mackenzie who commanded the British troops in the Calcutta garrison, he set off an explosion in a cache of gunpowder at the other end.

That Bose built all the equipment in the abysmal conditions that existed at the University of Calcutta then, and the country as a whole, in the 1890s makes the achievement even more mind-boggling and creditworthy. Over the next decade, Bose obtained four US and UK patents for his invention with the aid of friends.

It took some five years more for a technician of mixed Italian-Irish parentage, Guglielmo Marconi, to make a similar public demonstration. In the heyday of imperialism, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to 35-year-old Marconi and a 59-year old German physicist from Strasbourg, Karl Ferdinand Braun, “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.”

Bose was not given the prize although he had published his results in leading international journals and lectured at the Royal Institution in London in 1897 at the invitation of his teacher, Lord Rayleigh, one of the most distinguished British scientists of the time. In 1899 Bose read a paper at the Royal Society in London, ‘On a Self-Recovering Coherer and the Study of the Cohering Action of Different Metals,’ on his invention of the coherer which used conductors separated by mercury. In the paper, which was published in April 1899, he wrote: “For very delicate adjustments of pressure, I used in some of the following experiments an U-tube filled with mercury, with a plunger in one of the limbs; various substances were adjusted to touch barely the mercury in the other limb. ... I then interposed a telephone in the circuit; each time a flash of radiation fell on the receiver the telephone sounded.” Performing a series of experiments, Bose concluded that“there can be no doubt that the action was entirely due to electric radiation.”

More than two years later, Marconi transmitted radio waves across the Atlantic, using Bose’s coherer—with nary a mention of Bose. Academic honours such as a DSc by research from London University, a knighthood in 1917 and a membership of the Royal Society of London in 1920 that were conferred on Bose did little to affirm his pioneering status as the father of wireless. Ironically, in a book by Orrin Dunlap, which Marconi personally edited, a page and a half is devoted to Bose, who is acknowledged by Marconi to have provided crucial support at a critical juncture when he needed it most.

Partial amends were made in 1998 when the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), New York, a global professional academy in the field, announced: “Our investigative research into the origin and first major use of solid state diode detector devices led to the discovery that the first transatlantic wireless signal in Marconi’s world-famous experiment was received by Marconi using the iron-mercury-iron-coherer with a telephone detector invented by Sir JC Bose in 1898.”

With these revelations, belated though they are, we may safely say that Bose, and not Marconi, was the discoverer and demonstrator of wireless radio propagation through free space and thus the father of radio, television and all other forms of radio communication including the Internet. The IEEE inducted Bose into its Wireless Hall of Fame.

Against this background, the Centre for the Philosophy and Foundations of Science, New Delhi, led by its Director Ranjit Nair, teamed up with Christ’s College Cambridge (of which Dr Nair is an alumnus) to organise at the college a symposium titled “Beyond Frontiers: From Physics to Plant Sciences,” on December 6, 2008 to mark Bose’s 150th birth anniversary. At the symposium, Cambridge scientists expressed their appreciation of Bose’s pioneering contributions. The physicist ECG Sudarshan spoke on Bose’s work in electromagnetism, while distinguished plant geneticist M.S. Swaminathan (also a Cambridge alumnus), spoke on green genes to combat global warming.

A bust of Bose made by a Kolkata sculptor was unveiled by India’s High Commissioner in London, Shiv Shankar Mukherjee. Two Kolkata physicists, Bikash Sinha and Sibaji Raha, respectively Directors of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Bose Institute (founded by Bose in 1917), spoke. The Master of Christ’s College, Frank Kelly, welcomed the gathering and Dr Ranjit Nair proposed a vote of thanks. Leading scientists from the UK such as David King, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government; Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College Cambridge; and Partha Dasgupta, Professor of Economics at Cambridge, were present. (So was this writer.)

In a curious twist to the tale, Marconi’s grandson, the space physicist Francesco Paresce Marconi, while on a visit to Kolkata in 2006, expressed his astonishment on finding at the Bose Institute the coherer that his grandfather had used to receive the trans-Atlantic wireless signal. “The instrument was critical to radio communication,” he said. On another visit to Kolkata some weeks ago, the grandson is reported to have said that while Bose was a Professor of Physics of international repute, his grandfather was a technician, who nonetheless deserved credit for turning Bose’s discovery and the equipment he invented into an industrial innovation. He admitted it was unfair that Bose was overlooked by the Nobel Committee.

By crossing the boundaries of physics into plant physiology, Bose seemed to some of his dogmatic contemporaries a dangerous heretic. But the more perceptive among them saw him to be a visionary. One must not forget that the distinction between living and lifeless matter was by and large taken for granted among his scientific and lay contemporaries. It required courage and belief in oneself to demonstrate similarities in the electrical responses of living matter and lifeless matter. His theory of the ascent of sap as being due to electromechanical processes involving pumping within living plant cells took six decades to be verified experimentally.

The symposium, and the unveiling of a bust of Jagadis Chandra Bose in his Cambridge alma mater, mark a milestone in the way Indian scientific capabilities are perceived worldwide. It is perhaps the only case so far when an iconic British institution like Cambridge University saw it fit to commemorate an outstanding Indian scientist of colonial times 150 years after his birth in British India. Can we say that at long last, the prowess and international image of our country are changing among scientific circles? We have every reason for cautious optimism.

http://www.hindu.com/2009/03/17/stories/2009031755620900.htm

Here is an Internet write-up about JC Bose

His Life and Work

Acharya J C Bose was born on 30th November 1858 in Mymensingh, India (now in Bangladesh). He was educated at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta and later at the Universities of London and Cambridge. He was Professor of Physics at the Presidency College, Calcutta between 1884 and 1915. In 1917 he founded the Bose Institute and was its Director till 1937. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, London, and honoured by several foreign and Indian Universities and scientific bodies. He was knighted in 1921.

Bose successfully developed the world's first wireless communication link using millimeter waves for the remote control of a gun inducing electric sparks in a cavity resonator system. Early in 1895, two years before Marconi's demonstration, Bose transmitted signals at the Town Hall in Calcutta through three intervening walls to a room 75 feet away in the presence of the then Governor of Bengal. Significantly, when the successors of Hertz like Lodge, Righi, Marconi, and Popov were working with decimeter or centimeter waves in the 1890s, J C Bose chose to work with millimeter waves. The wavelengths used by Bose varied from about 25mm to 5mm, which enabled him to prove many quasi-optical properties of electromagnetic waves like reflection, refraction, polarization, rotation of the plane of polarization etc.

Bose modelled a solid state detector using Galena which was sensitive to both millimeter waves, as well as to visible radiations from infrared to violet. He devised the horn antenna, which in its various modern forms is today perhaps the most widely employed component for microwave and millimeter wave communication systems, radars, and remote sensing systems. He also developed the dielectric lens and the wire grid polariser. All such intense scientific research activities were carried out in pre-independent India which could offer little by way of research support.

Bose later worked on the fatigue effect in metallic coherers used for detection of electromagnetic waves. Bose's work on the fatigue effect in metallic coherers indicate that physical forces involved in the radio may be involved in biological phenomena, an inference which ultimately led to his famous generalization on the similarity of response in the living and the non-living. In his later life he was concerned with plant physiological investigations where he established the similarity of response to stimulation shown both by animal and plant tissue.

He died on 23rd November 1937.

The Controversy Behind Bose's Work

In 1898, Bose demonstrated for the first time his original equipment of wireless communication which was based on the Branly Lodge coherer detector. This was denoted as "Iron mercury iron coherer with a telephone detector" in the proceedings of the Royal Society in April 1899.

At this same time, the young Italian scientist G Marconi had been working on the application of electromagnetic waves to telegraphy. The instrument he used as the detector in his receiving antenna was termed as "coherer", which was identical to the one demonstated by Bose in 1898. The technology of this "coherer" was however communicated to him by his childhood friend and Lieutenant in the Italian Navy, Luigi Solari. However, keeping the erstwhile laws of patency in view, Solari had slightly modified the original U-shaped tube used by Bose by changing it into a straight tube before presenting it to Marconi. The latter, after transmitting the first wireless signal across the Atlantic in 1901, announced his success at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

The controversy actually surfaced when another group working in the Italian Navy led by Paolo Castolli claimed priority in the detecting trans Atlantic Electro Magnatic waves. When a group of experts including Oliver Lodge raised serious questions about the "coherer" used by Marconi, he was eventually compelled to admit in his "Marconigram" that he had actually used an "iron-mercury-iron-coherer with a telephone detector"—the term being identical to that used by Bose though no mention of his name was made.

At the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium, held in June 1997 at Denver, Colorado, USA, Dr. D. T. Emerson of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Tucson, Arizona presented a paper. This contained a brief account of Bose's work and a description of the instruments he used along with photographs. The paper, "The Work of Jagadis Chandra Bose: 100 Years of MM-Wave Research", was published in December 1997 issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques. In its efforts to reevaluate and establish the contribution of Bose in this field, the IEEE is organizing an International Conference in Calcutta in 1998. The research findings presented here would then be published for critical review. Counter-claims contrary to the views expressed by the IEEE should be communicated within a period of six months. The outcome of this procedure would be deemed as the final judgement behind this issue.