A brief Intro

Jagadish Chandra Bose was an Indian scientist whom I knew more about his research on plant physiology but it never came to my notice that he was a pioneer in wireless technology. Before he changed his attention to botany he was into physics and electromagnetics. What we know today as the latest 5G technology (millimeter waves) in mobile communication, he was working on such stuff in in the last decade of 19th Century. It was common for scientists to have interests in various domains over their lifetime those days. This has kind of reduced quite a lot in modern times due to complex nature of research.

Vaclav Smil in his book Numbers Don’t Lie mentioned that 1880’s were the most inventive time in human history and Bose’s contribution in Electromagnetic wave was also during that time. 

Indian Scientific legacy is many times dominated by thoughts of great mathematicians and astronomers who lived quite sometime back. Generally it is believed that there was a golden era and it goes into many times into myth building as the kind of information is either not available or is encrypted in hymns that needs interpretation. But Jagadish Chandra Bose is much more recent and in this article I would like to bring his work and as Indians we can be proud of his legacy.

Early Life

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in Undivided India on 30th November 1858 in a village of Rarikhal in Vikrampur, some 50 km west of Dhaka (current Bangladesh). His father Bhagaban  Chandra Bose was a Deputy Magistrate of Vikrampur, so he was from somewhat elite background. Bose studies both in Calcutta and London after which he joined Presidency College as a Professor of Physics. He has his own share of struggle with the British education hierarchy of those days and after lot of hassle he could join the Presidency College and was allotted a small room  where he conducted his experiments on electromagnetics

 

 

Experiment 

James Clerk Maxwell’s equation predicting the existence of electromagnetic radiation propagating at the speed of light were made public in 1865 and in 1888 Hertz had demonstrated generation of electromagnetic waves, and that their properties were similar to those of light. The book “Heinrich Hertz and His Successors” impressed Bose and he started to do experiment in electromagnetics. 

Jagadish Chandra Bose, in 1895, first demonstrated at Presidency College, Calcutta transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves at 60 GHz, over a distance of 23 meters, through two intervening walls by remotely ringing a bell and detonating gunpowder. For his communication system, Bose developed entire millimeter-wave components such as: a spark transmitter, coherer, dielectric lens, polarizer, horn antenna and cylindrical diffraction grating. His setup looked something like this. He did this experiment in front of a crowd which had then Governor General of India in the audience.

 

Bose did file a patent  called “DETECTOR FOR ELECTRICAL DISTURBANCES” in 1901 but never exercised his rights over it. Marconi used Bose’s Coherer design during the first transatlantic wireless communication. He never credited Bose for invention and even filed a patent in Britain. Marconi and others won Nobel prize for the their contribution to wireless telegraphy

Bose quickly moved on to study effects of various stimuli on Plants and spent rest of the career contributing to the knowledge of Botany. 

India as well as world forgot Bose’s contributions in the field of wireless but it astounding that he was far ahead of his time and was able to contribute original research from the humble lab of Presidency College.  

References

1. Biography: https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/pdf/b29930534
2. https://www.edn.com/jc-bose-patents-radio-wave-detector-september-30-1901/#:~:text=He%20developed%20the%20use%20of,junction%20to%20detect%20radio%20waves.
3. Patent: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f6/dc/bb/18b8df78688796/US755840.pdf
4. https://www.cv.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html