Jagadish
Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858, in Myemsingh, Faridpur, a
part of
the Dhaka District now in Bangladesh. He attended
the village school till he was 11. He then moved to Kolkata where he
enrolled
in St. Xavier’s. He was very much interested in Biology. However,
Father
Lafont, a famous Professor of Physics, inspired in Bose a great
interest in
Physics.
Having obtained his
B.A. in
physical sciences, twenty two year old Bose left for London, to obtain
a
medical degree. However, he kept falling ill and had to discontinue his
plans
to be a doctor. He then obtained his B.A. degree from Christ College,
Cambridge.
He returned to India
in 1885 and
joined Presidency College, Kolkata as an Assistant Professor of
Physics, where
he remained till 1915. There was a
peculiar
practice in the college at that time. The Indian teachers in the
college were
paid one third of what the British teachers were paid! So Bose refused
his
salary but worked for three years. The fourth year he was paid in full!
He was
an excellent teacher, extensively using scientific demonstrations in
class. Some of his students,
such as S. N. Bose went on
to become famous physicists themselves.
During this period,
Bose also
started doing original scientific work in the area of microwaves,
carrying out
experiments involving refraction, diffraction
and polarization. He developed the use of galena crystals for making receivers, both for short wavelength
radio waves
and for white and ultraviolet light.
In 1895, two years before Marconi’s demonstration, Bose demonstrated wireless communication using radio
waves, using
them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder.
Many of the
microwave components familiar today - waveguides, horn antennas, polarizers,
dielectric
lenses and prisms, and even semiconductor detectors of electromagnetic
radiation - were invented and used by Bose in the last decade of the
nineteenth
century. He also suggested the existence of electromagnetic radiation
from the
Sun, which was confirmed in 1944.
Bose
then turned his attention to response phenomena in plants. He showed
that not
only animal but vegetable tissues, produce similar electric response
under
different kinds of stimuli – mechanical, thermal, electrical and
chemical.