Amar G. Bose

Amar G. Bose

Amar Gopal Bose (born November 2, 1929 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † July 12, 2013 in Wayland , Massachusetts ) was an American electrical engineer and founder of the Bose Corporation .

Life

Bose's father, Nani Gopal Bose, was a Bengali revolutionary who fled Calcutta from the British colonial police. He worked as an importer of coconut and sisal mats and was active in the US civil rights movement. When Nani Gopal Bose's import business collapsed because of World War II, 13-year-old Amar contributed to the family's income by repairing radios. At the age of 17, Amar Bose was accepted at MIT and finally received his PhD in electrical engineering from Yuk-Wing Lee in 1956 (dissertation topic A Theory of nonlinear systems ). Bose became an assistant professor at MIT.

When the lover of classical music bought a first-class stereo system , he was disappointed with the listening impression despite the good technical values. From 1956 to 1968 Bose conducted basic research on psychoacoustics , including going to the concert hall of the Boston Symphony Orchestra with one of the first artificial heads . He determined that only about ten percent of the sound reaches the ear directly, the rest, on the other hand, is previously reflected on surfaces. From this insight he developed a loudspeaker that radiated in all spatial directions.

Amar Bose didn't think about starting a business for a long time until his doctoral advisor at MIT, Yuk-Wing Lee, urged him to do so. In 1964 he founded the Bose Corporation . In 1968 he built the loudspeaker "901 Directing / Reflecting", which mainly radiated backwards and thus indirectly via the reflections from the walls of the room. Instead of the usual passive crossover network, the loudspeaker contained an active equalizer and - in contrast to conventional stereo loudspeakers - enabled good spatial listening at almost any point in the room. It was manufactured in various further developed series until 2015. In 1987 he outsourced the bass loudspeakers, which take up a lot of space in the chassis. They can be set up anywhere in the room so that only small loudspeakers for high and medium tones need to be placed in front of the audience. This finally resulted in a home entertainment system in 1995 that is used in many home theaters. Bose also manufactures headphones that actively neutralize external noise by emitting the same noise in phase opposition . Bose also simulates the acoustics of rooms that have not yet been built.

Until the death of Amar G. Bose in 2013, the Bose Corporation was one of the few remaining owner-managed consumer electronics companies and today employs more than 9,000 people. One of Bose's principles is to reinvest a large part of the profits back into research. Among other things, he donated the majority of the shares in his company to his alma mater in 2011 , so that the dividends benefit research. In addition to audio systems, products for medical technology, aviation and the automotive industry are now also available. A shock absorber system is ready for use, even if not yet competitively priced.

According to Forbes, Bose was one of the 1000 richest people.

Awards

• 1991: Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2011: Honorary Member of the Acoustical Society of America

Fonts

• AG Bose, KN Stevens: Introductory network theory , Harper and Row 1965

literature

• Michael Köhler: He teaches us to listen with a system . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . No. 265, November 13, 2010, p. Z3.

Web links

• Short biography of Amar Gopal Bose (English)
• Bose at MIT (English)
• Bose's electromagnetic car suspension
• Amar G. Bose in the nndb (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Amar Bose '51, SM '52, ScD '56, Bose Corporation's founder, has died at 83 , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accessed July 12, 2013.
2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
3. ↑ Bose 901 and the CD, hifimuseum.de , accessed on October 16, 2018.
4. ↑ Matthias Stark: Bose 901 loudspeakers - a HiFi legend uptodate - history of all series. In: www.lukemarvin.de. Retrieved June 28, 2016 . 
5. ↑ Bose founder gives MIT a majority stake ( memento of the original from June 8, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ The World's Richest People # 645 Amar Bose, forbes.com , accessed June 1, 2012.