The contribution of Jagadish Chandra Bose cannot be bound by time or century. He has several firsts to his credit, but he was so engrossed in his work that he never pursued fame.
Dr Jagadish Chandra Bose was a scientist of rare intellect. The extent of work carried out by Bose was significant because no other scientist had done any work in this field. And he will be remembered for another important deed. He always made an attempt to get Indian officials the same respect and salary as their British counterparts. He struggled for three years and was finally successful in getting the same salary as an English professor.
Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in Memansingh district (now in Bangladesh) of West Bengal on 30 November 1858. His father was a collector. At the age of 13, he went to Calcutta (now Kolkata) for higher education and, in 1880, he received admission at Christ College in Cambridge. At Cambridge, he worked with a professor of physics, Roley. It was here that he befriended the famous biologist Dr Vines and became interested in biology.
In 1885, he returned to Calcutta and was appointed professor of physical science at Presidency College.
After dedicating himself to teaching, his interest in conducting research was sparked. In 1915, he left the university to found the Bose Research Institute, Calcutta. He first conducted research on electricity and with the help of wires created waves that made a telephone, which was kept at a distance of 75 feet, ring. His experiment on the quasi-optical properties of very short radio waves led him to make improvements on the cohere, an early form of radio detector, which contributed to the development of solid-state physics. However, in spite of the fact that Bose studied electric waves first, it was Marconi who got the credit.
Dr Bose then switched over to botany and began to study plants very minutely. For his research, he invented a device called the cryocograph. This device measured the development of a plant. He constructed automatic recorders that could register even the slightest movements. He also developed other devices to measure the effect of sleep, air, food and poison. With the help of his research, he concluded that plants also slept, felt joy and pain like other living beings.
Because of his exemplary works, Dr Bose was made a member of the Royal Society of London. He went to England and America a number of times and demonstrated his research with the help of his devices. In 1915, he pooled in all his resources and established the Bose Research Institute. He was able to interest the world’s scientists in his work and his fame grew. Rabindranath Tagore remained one of his steadfast friends.
His published works include Response in the Living and Non-living and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants.