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Journalism of Courage
(This is part of the series Make History Fun Again, where the writers introduce historical facts, events and personalities in a fun way for parents to start a conversation with their kids.)
By Archana Garodia Gupta and Shruti Garodia
The immensely talented Jagdish Chandra Bose was one of India’s first modern scientists. He was a pioneer in the field of wireless telecommunication – a field which would eventually lead to invention of the radio, TV, wifi and even cell phones!
Here are some interesting facts about one of India’s greatest scientists.
Bose was born in 1858 in rural Bengal. Although his father was a deputy magistrate in Bengal, he flouted convention and insisted on sending his son to the local Bengali village school for some years instead of a Western-style English-medium school. Not only that, young Bose’s day to day care was entrusted to an ex-dacoit who his father had once sentenced to jail!
Bose went on to graduate from Calcutta University, and then studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University in Britain.
On JC Bose’s return to India, he secured a Professorship of Physics at the prestigious Presidency College in Calcutta. This was most unusual for the time, when only Englishmen were thought to be qualified enough to teach ‘science’ subjects there.
However, an Indian could only ever get two-thirds of the salary of an Englishman, regardless of his qualifications or his post. In protest, Bose swore he wouldn’t touch even one of his pay checks. After three long years of wrangling, Presidency College finally relented and Bose started to receive equal pay as his British peers, including back-pay!
Bose now started researching the seemingly crazy idea of transmitting electrical signals without wires! A scientist in America and a Dr Marconi of Italy were also furiously trying to demonstrate the same.
For his research, JC Bose had to invent his own instruments, which had to be ultra-sensitive, far more than anything available then. It was with some pride that he later informed international scientists that all the instruments were made in India, by Indian workmen.
In 1895, in the presence of the Governor of Bengal, Sir William Mackenzie, Professor Bose transmitted an ether wave through a solid wall and a whole bunch of men, had it ring a bell, and discharge a gun! However, it was Dr Marconi who was finally granted the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in “wireless telegraphy”.
Eventually, wireless telegraphy would lead to the radio, television, Wi-Fi and even cell phones!
Bose had the option to put patents on his discoveries and make millions from them. Indeed, various radio companies regularly tried to cut deals with him, but he was having none of it. His objections to patenting were well-known, and he freely shared the working behind his instruments in his lectures, available to one and all.
Jagdish Chandra Bose was always interested in nature. This led him to start investigating whether plants could ‘feel’. He constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements, which led him to track electrical signals in plants and discover that plants quiver when injured! Until then, all available research had indicated that plants have no nervous systems.
This research got him into plenty of controversy with other British scientists because he refused to stay strictly ‘within his academic area’ of physics. Famous biologists and physiologists thought he was intruding on their territory. However, he overcame opposition gradually and his work excited a lot of interest worldwide.
JC Bose was proud of India’s ancient glory in the sciences, but wanted her to emerge as a leader in modern science as well. As he went around lecturing from America to Japan, he once said, “Nothing could be more vulgar or more untrue than the ignorant assertion that the world owes its progress of knowledge to any one particular race. The whole world is interdependent and a constant stream of thought has throughout the ages enriched the common heritage of mankind…Science is neither of the East nor of the West, but international…”
Last but not least, Bose was also one of India’s first science fiction authors! The Bengali Niruddesher Kahini, written in 1896, is a (science) fictional tale of how the hero controls a cyclone using a bottle of hair oil!
(For more fun journeys through India’s history, check out the newly released two-volume set, The History of India for Children Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, published by Hachette India, which is now available online and in bookstores across the country.)
