Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath whose two major works came from two distinct fields of science electromagnetism and plant physiology. He was considered the first modem and experimental scientist of India.
J.C. Bose was born in 1858 in Bengal Presidency (which is now a place in Bangladesh). Bose graduated from St. Xavier’s College. Calcutta, and went on to do Natural Science from Cambridge University. He conducted researches with the English physical scientist Lord Rayleigh at Cambridge and returned to India in 1885. He found himself a join at the Presidency College, Calcutta, on a temporary basis, where he was subjected to racial discrimination. Later he was made permanent and was given a dingy laboratory to conduct his experiments in. Colonial British did not encourage original research by Indians.
Inventions in wireless waves
Working from here, Bose followed up on German physicist Heinrich Hertzs discovery of electromagnetic waves. Bose came up with the Millimetre Waves, the shortest radiowaves of 5mm. In 1895, Bose demonstrated wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves to the public in Calcutta. And the world started taking notice of this modern scientist from India. In 1899, Bose came up with another development the iron-mercury-iron coherer, a primitive form of radio signal detector, and presented it at the Royal Society, London. Years later Marconi transmitted radio waves across the Atlantic using Bose’s coherer. Bose also has the distinction of using a semiconductor junction to detect radio waves for the first time.
Plants have feelings too
From electromagnetic waves, Jagdish Chandra Bose’s attention turned to plant biology. In 1901, he showed that plants are also sensitive to and temperature. Bose demonstrated how poison could create human-like suffering in plants using an instrument he developed-crescograph. He had a plant dipped up to its stem in a vessel containing a poisonous bromide solution. When the crescograph with the plant was plugged in. people could view how the lighted spot on a screen showed the movements of the plant which beat, vibrated and stopped, corresponding to the plant’s suffering and death.
Legacy
Bose founded a research institute – Bose Institute in Calcutta in 1971. The same year, he was knighted by the British government. In 2009, on his 150th birth anniversary, Bose was honoured as one of the Fathers of Radio Science.
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