Jagadish Chandra Bose

Jagadish Chandra Bose in his laboratory

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose CSI CIE FRS ( Bengali : জগদীশ চন্দ্র বসু , Jagadīś Chandra Basu ; born November 30, 1858 in Maimansingh , Bengal , today in Bangladesh ; † November 23, 1937 in Giridih , Bengal, today in India ) was an Indian scientist . He dealt with physics and botany and was one of the pioneers of radio. In addition to sound transmission , he was interested in the effects of electromagnetic waves on living beings, especially plants, and carried out a large number of experiments on this.

Childhood and youth

Bose was born on November 30, 1858 into a Bengali Kayastha family. Bose grew up in Faridpur , where his father was a magistrate. When he was nine he was sent to school in Kolkata . After graduating in 1877, he began studying medicine in London in 1880. After a year he broke off his studies for health reasons, as he suffered from malaria , which caused him many problems throughout his life. In the following years he studied at Christ's College in Cambridge with famous personalities such as John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh , James Dewar , Michael Foster and Francis Darwin .

Activity as a researcher

He returned to Kolkata at Calcutta University with a diploma in his pocket and was appointed professor of physics at Presidency College , where he taught and researched for the next 30 years. However, he was initially only supposed to receive half the salaries of his British colleagues. In protest, he refused the salary and worked for three years without pay and without a day's absence, until the people in charge Twany and Croft paid him the same salary as his British colleagues because of his impeccable discipline. Following Strutt, he made important experiments during his lectures and left the impression of a passionate professor. Satyendranath Bose , known for the Bose-Einstein statistics, was among his students .

From 1894 to 1900, before Guglielmo Marconi became famous in the field, Bose produced several important publications on electromagnetic waves . He demonstrated the remote effect of electromagnetic waves in 1894 by ringing a bell from a distance and detonating an explosive charge under remote control. In 1896 the Daily Chronicle of England reported the following: “The inventor (JC Bose) sent a signal over a distance of about a kilometer and thus obtained the first obvious and outstanding application of this new excellent theory (The theory of electromagnetic waves by Heinrich Hertz ) ". Alexander Popov carried out similar experiments in Russia, but wrote in December 1895 that he still hoped to carry out a signal transmission over a certain distance with radio waves . Marconi made his first demonstration in Salisbury , England, in May 1897 (he worked in the UK due to a lack of interest from Italians in his research).

In contrast to the Italian scientist, Bose had no interest in commercializing his discovery and affirmed that he only worked for basic research. He wrote to Rabindranath Tagore in 1901 after completing his research on radio waves: “I wish you could see this hideous attachment that this country has for profit ... that greed for money ... once in There would be no escape for me from this trap. ”(“ I wish you could see that terrible attachment for gain in this country .... that lust for money ... Once caught in that trap there would have been no way out for me ").

During his work he generated waves with a wavelength of 5 millimeters, studied refraction , diffraction and polarization . He also used the galena as a primitive form of a diode as a wave detector. In 1954, Gerald Pearson and Walter Brattain described in "History of Semiconductors Research" the use of crystals as wave detectors in Bose's work. Nevill F. Mott , 1977 Nobel laureate in physics, said, "JC Bose was 60 years ahead of his time" and "He prepared P and N-type semiconductors" .

Research work as a plant physiologist

After 1900, Bose turned away from physics and spent a long time researching the physiology of plants. There, too, he did pioneering work. He published publications on the effects of electromagnetic radiation on plants and their growth. He developed instruments to measure the influence of the rays on the plants, in particular an apparatus which he called "crescograph" and with which he could observe the growth of plants with up to 10 million times amplification. In particular, Bose was interested in the flow velocity of the protoplasm in the plant under various environmental conditions.

He retired in 1915 but worked for another five years. He founded the Bose Institute in Kolkata, India's first research center. It was inaugurated on November 30, 1917. Nature magazine published 27 of his publications.

Awards

Bose has received multiple awards from the UK government for its work. In 1903 he became a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire appointed in 1912 to Companion of the Order of the Star of India , 1917, he was finally as a Knight Bachelor for beaten knight and received the title "Sir". 1920 Bose was also elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society . In 1970 the lunar crater Bose was named after him.

Others

His wife, Abala Bose, was a well-known social reformer. In 2009 the botanical garden in Haora / Kolkata was renamed Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden in his honor.

Works

• The physiology of juice rising , translated by Ernst Pringsheim, Jena, 1925 (Note: in English Chandra was sometimes referred to as Chunder, which has been adopted here.)
• The plant script and its revelations , translated by Dr. K. Höfler (Vienna), Rotapfel-Verl. Zurich, 1928

literature

• Patrick Geddes : Life and work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose , Rotapfel-Verlag, Erlenbach-Zürich 1930.

Web links

Commons : Jagadish Chandra Bose  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography (s)
• The Work of Jagadish Chandra Bose. 100 Years of MM-Wave Research
• The Torch Bearers of Indian Renaissance (PDF; 1.5 MB)
• The life and work of Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose
• Newspaper article about Jagadish Chandra Bose in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature