Jagadish Chandra Bose

Bengali physicist

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose CSI CIE FRS(/bo?s/;, IPA: [d??godi? t??ndro bo?u]; 30 November 1858 – 23 November 1937) was a biologist, physicist, botanist and an early writer of science fiction.

He pioneered the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent.

He has been named one of the fathers of radio science. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction.

He invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the moon was named in his honour.

He founded Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia.

He served as the Director of Bose Institute from its inception until his death. Born in Munshiganj, Bengal Presidency, during British governance of India (now in Bangladesh), Bose graduated from St.

Xavier's College, Calcutta (now Kolkata, West Bengal, India). He attended the University of London to study medicine, but had to give it up due to health problems.

Instead, he conducted research with Nobel Laureate Lord Rayleigh at the University of Cambridge. Bose returned to India to join the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta as a professor of physics.

There, despite racial discrimination and a lack of funding and equipment, Bose carried on his scientific research. He made progress in his research into radio waves in the microwave spectrum and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves.

Bose made pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli and proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues.

Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions because of peer pressure, but he was generally critical of the patent system.

To facilitate his research, he constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements; these instruments produced some striking results, such as quivering of injured plants, which Bose interpreted as a power of feeling in plants.

His books include Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902) and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926). He spent the last years of his life in Giridih.

Here he lived in the house located near Jhanda Maidan. This building was named Jagdish Chandra Bose Smriti Vigyan Bhavan.

It was inaugurated on 28 February 1997 by the then Governor of Bihar AR Kidwai. In a 2004 BBC poll to name the Greatest Bengali of all time, Bose placed seventh.