Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858, inMyemsingh, 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 Xaviers 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 BA 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 BA 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 Marconis 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