Jagadish Chandra Bose: Pioneer of Radio and Plant Science

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) was a Bengali physicist and plant physiologist who, working in a small laboratory at Presidency College, Calcutta, carried out some of the earliest experiments in wireless communication — and then devoted three decades to measuring the responses of plants. In 1895 he transmitted millimetre-length radio waves across a hall and through walls to ring a bell and fire gunpowder at a distance. He built the first semiconductor detector of radio waves and founded one of Asia's first interdisciplinary research institutes. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named him one of the fathers of radio science. Few scientists have left a mark on two such different fields.

Early Life in Bikrampur and Cambridge

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858 in Bengal Presidency, British India. His family came from Rarikhal village in Bikrampur, the historic region south of Dhaka now in Munshiganj district, Bangladesh, and many accounts give Bikrampur as his birthplace; the Royal Society's biographical record and Banglapedia instead name Mymensingh, where his father was then serving. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was a deputy magistrate and a member of the Brahmo Samaj, and he made a decision that shaped his son's outlook: instead of an English-medium school, the boy was sent to a vernacular school at Faridpur, because his father believed a child should first learn his own language and know his own people.

At about eleven he was sent to Calcutta, to Hare School and then St Xavier's School and College, where the Jesuit scientist Father Eugène Lafont drew him to the physical sciences. He passed the University of Calcutta's entrance examination in 1875 and took his BA in the science group in 1879. In 1880 he sailed for England and began in medicine at the University of London, but ill health — the dissecting room made him sick — forced him to abandon it. On the advice of his brother-in-law Anandamohan Bose he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, to read for the Natural Sciences Tripos, and there attended the lectures of Lord Rayleigh. In 1884 he took the Cambridge BA through the Tripos and a BSc from the University of London, returning to India trained in experimental physics at the highest level then available.

Presidency College and the Salary Protest

In January 1885 Bose took up an appointment as an officiating (temporary) professor of physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. He was the first Indian to hold such a post in physics there, and the terms exposed the racial arithmetic of the colonial education service: an Indian professor was paid two-thirds of the salary of a European in the same position, and because his appointment was temporary, that amount was halved again, leaving him one-third of a European colleague's pay.

His response became one of the most famous episodes of his life. According to his biographer Patrick Geddes, Bose refused, as a protest, to touch his salary at all: for three years he taught and worked without drawing any pay. The protest worked. The authorities made his position permanent with retrospective effect, and he received the three years' salary in a single lump sum. The story has been retold ever since as an early, quiet assertion that an Indian scientist's work was worth exactly what a European's was.

Bose remained at Presidency College for thirty years, until his retirement in 1915, when he was made Professor Emeritus. The college gave him little: he researched in a small improvised laboratory, bought much of his apparatus with his own money, and had his instruments made by local craftsmen. The constraint shaped his style — small, elegant, self-built apparatus, and experiments designed so that a single careful measurement could answer a large question.

The Wireless Experiments of the 1890s

In 1888 Heinrich Hertz had proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell, and experimenters such as Oliver Lodge were taking them up. Bose, who began the subject in 1894, made a distinctive choice: where others worked with waves metres long, he shortened them to the millimetre scale — down to about 5 millimetres, a frequency near 60 gigahertz — so that they could be handled like light on a laboratory bench and their optical behaviour studied precisely.

For this he had to invent an entire technology: between 1894 and 1900 he built spark radiators, waveguides, horn antennas, dielectric lenses and prisms, polarisers, diffraction gratings, and a succession of sensitive receivers. He refined the period's crude coherer receivers, and by the end of the decade was detecting his waves with a contact between a metal point and a crystal of galena — lead sulphide. It was the first semiconductor detector: in 1954 the Bell Laboratories physicists George Pearson and Walter Brattain, writing the early history of semiconductor research, gave Bose priority for it.

His first paper, on the polarisation of electric rays by double-refracting crystals, was communicated to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in May 1895; a second was communicated to the Royal Society by Lord Rayleigh that October. In 1895 came the demonstration for which he is best remembered: at a public showing in Calcutta, his millimetre waves crossed about 23 metres, passed through intervening walls, and at the receiving end rang a bell and ignited a charge of gunpowder. The IEEE's Milestone citation, placed at Presidency College in 2012, commemorates that demonstration; biographical accounts describe Bose's public lecture-demonstration of November 1895 at Calcutta's Town Hall. In January 1897, at Rayleigh's invitation, he presented the work in a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution in London. In April 1899 he presented to the Royal Society his iron–mercury–iron coherer with telephone detector, a self-recovering receiver.

What Bose did not do matters to the record as well: he was investigating the nature of the waves, not building a messaging business, and he published his designs openly, taking out no patent on any of it for years.

The Question of Priority

Because Bose demonstrated wireless transmission in 1895 — before Guglielmo Marconi filed his first British wireless patent in June 1896 and made his first successful tests on Salisbury Plain in May 1897 — he is often presented as the true "inventor of radio". The documented record supports something more precise, and more interesting.

On chronology, the case for Bose's early lead is strong: D. T. Emerson of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, who studied Bose's apparatus and papers in detail, concluded that his public demonstration of wireless signalling appears to predate Marconi's. Bose was also doing something Marconi never attempted — working at millimetre wavelengths, a region of the spectrum radio engineering would not seriously exploit for another half-century.

But the two men's aims differed, and historians of technology generally treat that difference as decisive for how credit is shared. Marconi set out to build a practical system of wireless telegraphy and organised the patents, companies and experiments to achieve it. Bose set out to answer questions in physics, published everything, and left the field around 1900. "Radio" was an accumulation, not a single invention: Hertz's waves, Popov's and Lodge's receivers, Tesla's tuned circuits, Marconi's system-building, Bose's detectors and millimetre-wave techniques. That is why careful formulations — the IEEE's, for instance — stop short of a sole-inventor claim, and why this article does too.

Two footnotes complete the picture. First, the detector question: the historian Probir Bondyopadhyay argued in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1998 that the mercury coherer used to receive Marconi's first transatlantic signal in December 1901 derived from Bose's 1899 design, reaching Marconi through an Italian naval officer, Luigi Solari. The argument is documented but contested. Second, the patent: persuaded by friends, among them the American patron Sara Chapman Bull, Bose filed a US patent for his detector on 30 September 1901, to establish priority. US Patent 755,840, "Detector for Electrical Disturbances", was granted on 29 March 1904, covering among other things his galena contact detector; it is often described as the first US patent granted to a scientist from the Indian subcontinent. Bose made no attempt to exploit it commercially and allowed it to lapse.

The Turn to Plants: Crescograph and the Living Response

Around 1900, Bose's physics led him somewhere no one expected. His metal coherers, after repeated exposure to electric waves, became fatigued and lost sensitivity, then recovered after rest — a rhythm that reminded him of living tissue. Taking the physiologist Augustus Waller's criterion that response to stimulation is a universal sign of life, he began systematic experiments comparing how metals, animal tissue and plant tissue respond to many kinds of stimulus. His conclusion, published in Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902) and presented in Paris in 1900 and at the Royal Institution in 1901, was that the boundary between living and non-living matter was far less sharp than Victorian science assumed: similar stimuli produced similar, measurable response curves in all three.

From there he moved wholly into plant physiology, and began, characteristically, by building instruments. His most famous device was the crescograph, an arrangement of clockwork and levers, later refined with magnetic magnification, which recorded a plant's growth and movement enormously enlarged. Bose claimed magnifications of ten thousand times and, for the magnetic crescograph, far higher; those figures were his own and were challenged in his lifetime, but it registered growth responses within minutes that conventional methods needed days to show. With these instruments he measured how fast excitation travels through a plant stem, and how temperature, light, anaesthetics and poisons affect it. In The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926) he argued that plants possess something functionally like a nervous system: excitation generated at one point is conducted electrically and produces coordinated response at another — a claim at the heart of both his fame and the controversy around him.

In May 1920, before the Royal Society, Augustus Waller demonstrated against Bose's crescograph results, arguing that the movements Bose attributed to growth were artefacts — thermal and moisture effects already known to physiology. Many Western plant physiologists remained sceptical, and some of his specific theories did not survive: his proposal, in The Physiology of the Ascent of Sap (1923), that sap rises in trees because a layer of cells pulsates like a heart was not sustained; the cohesion–tension explanation remained standard. His photosynthesis experiments on the water plant Hydrilla (The Physiology of Photosynthesis, 1924) fared better: later researchers have noted that his observations anticipated aspects of what became, decades later, the study of C4 photosynthesis.

The modern verdict, in recent reviews by plant scientists and historians, is a divided one. That plants transmit electrical signals over long distances — action potentials, in modern terms — is now established plant science, and Bose is credited as a pioneer of plant electrophysiology and biophysics. His stronger claim, that plant and animal nervous systems are essentially the same, is not accepted. He was, in short, partly vindicated and partly refuted.

Bose Institute and the Final Years

Bose retired from Presidency College in 1915 and spent his remaining energy on the institution he had long planned. On 30 November 1917 — his birthday — he dedicated the Bose Institute in Calcutta (Basu Bigyan Mandir, "the temple of science") with an address titled "The Voice of Life": "I dedicate today this Institute not merely as a Laboratory but as a Temple." Rabindranath Tagore, his friend of many years, composed a song for the occasion that remains the institute's anthem. The institute was funded from Bose's own resources, public donations and supporters such as Sara Chapman Bull, and was designed against the grain of the time — physicists, chemists and biologists under one roof, in an interdisciplinary model the institute describes as the first of its kind in Asia. Bose directed it for the rest of his life.

Honours came in these years, from the very establishment that had once paid him a third of a European's salary. He had been made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1903 and a Companion of the Order of the Star of India in 1911; in 1917 he was knighted. On 13 May 1920 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the body that had published his papers for twenty-five years. He presided over the Indian Science Congress in 1927 and was a foundation Fellow of the National Institute of Sciences of India. Through the 1920s he lectured abroad and published a stream of monographs. He died at Giridih, in present-day Jharkhand, on 23 November 1937, one week short of his seventy-ninth birthday.

Legacy

Bose's most durable creation may be the institute itself. The Bose Institute still operates in Kolkata as a public research institute — since 1971 an autonomous institution under India's Department of Science and Technology — spanning physics, chemistry and the life sciences, and housing a museum where his original millimetre-wave apparatus can still be seen. For generations of South Asian scientists it has stood as proof that research of the first rank could be organised and directed from the region itself.

In 2012 the IEEE dedicated a Milestone plaque at Presidency College to the "First Millimeter-wave Communication Experiments by J.C. Bose, 1894–96" — the first IEEE Milestone awarded for a discovery made in India — recording that in 1895 he transmitted and received 60-gigahertz waves over 23 metres, through two intervening walls, ringing a bell and detonating gunpowder. A crater on the far side of the Moon, about 91 kilometres across, was named Bose by the International Astronomical Union in 1970, for his wireless work. In Bangladesh he is remembered as one of the land's first modern scientists — a son of Bikrampur who reached the Royal Institution and the Royal Society.

His legacy has a literary wing as well. In 1896 Bose won first prize in a story competition run by the Kuntalin hair-oil company with Niruddesher Kahini ("The Story of the Missing One"), a tale of a Bay of Bengal cyclone calmed by a bottle of hair oil poured on the waves. Revised as "Palatak Tufan" ("The Runaway Cyclone") in his Bengali collection Abyakta (1921), it stands as one of the first works of science fiction in Bengali, and Bose is honoured as a founding father of the genre.

Conclusion

Jagadish Chandra Bose's life resists tidy categories. He was a pioneer of radio who declined to become an inventor-entrepreneur; a physicist who spent his second career arguing that plants respond, conduct and, in his word, perceive; a colonial subject paid a third of a European's salary who ended as a knight and a Fellow of the Royal Society, while insisting throughout that knowledge belonged to everyone. Parts of his work were superseded; parts were doubted for decades, then absorbed into the mainstream; and the millimetre-wave experiments were fifty years ahead of the technology that could use them. What is not in doubt is the scale of the achievement: from a cramped room in Presidency College and an institute he built with his own money, a scientist from Bikrampur changed how the world thinks about both waves and living things.