Jagadish Chandra Bose

Jagadis Chandra Bose

Jagadis Chunder Bose

Bengal, India

1880–5 (education), 1896–7, 1900–2, 1907, 1914–15

Jagadish Chandra Bose was a Bengali scientist: a biologist, a physicist, a botanist and a writer of science fiction. He is considered the father of radio science as he was the first person in the world to demonstrate wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves after returning to India in 1885 (although he did not patent this invention, which was brought out by Marconi two years later). Bose then demonstrated how plants responded to various stimuli, demonstrating the electrical nature of this conduction. He is considered a pioneer in the field of biophysics.

Bose went to England in 1880 for his further education. Initially he had plans to compete for the Indian Civil Service and then to study medicine, but he enrolled in the natural sciences tripos at Christ's College, Cambridge. He received his BA in 1884 and then obtained a DSc from the University of London. He later received an honorary degree from Aberdeen University.

Bose returned to India in 1885 with a position at Presidency College, Calcutta. He returned to Britain and Europe a number of times to lecture. For example, in 1914 he lectured at Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal Institution. During this visit he had a private laboratory in Maida Vale, London, where various European scientists would visit Bose. He was founder and director of the Bose Research Institute, Calcutta in 1917. He was knighted in 1917 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920 (the first Indian to become a fellow for science as opposed to mathematics).