Okay, let's unpack this. We are diving into a
figure who is maybe one of the most overlooked
and yet, well, most profoundly influential scientists
of the last 150 years, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bozo.
That's right. Born in 1858, his life is just
this radical intersection of physics. botany
and institutional rebellion. It's unbelievable.
I mean, imagine a single person who pioneered
technology that's foundational to modern Wi -Fi.
And at the same time, developed the earliest
solid state semiconductor devices. And then on
top of that, built these ultra sensitive instruments
to prove that plants experience electrical responses,
almost like human nerve tissue. What's so fascinating
here is that incredible breadth. But it's coupled
with this rare, almost stubborn refusal to monetize
his genius. He wasn't just a scientist. He was,
I think, a true polymath who fundamentally rejected
the artificial barriers of his era. Whether they
were disciplinary boundaries, you know, separating
physics from biology. Or social barriers, like
the colonial era racial discrimination he faced
every day. His work, it really forces us to ask,
what truly separates the living from the non
-living? Well, our sources today give us a rich,
detailed look at Bose's journey. We're going
to cover his revolutionary work in millimeter
wave optics, the frustrating but essential controversy
around his inventions. And then his just astonishing
discoveries, proving the electrical sentience
of plants. So we're on a deep dive mission to
understand the full scope of this genius who,
well... who truly connected the living and the
non -living. To really understand the universal
scope of Bose's science, you first have to understand
the philosophy he developed right from his earliest
education. You absolutely do. It starts in what
was then the Bengal presidency, modern -day Bangladesh.
He was born in Maimon Singh in 1858. To a prominent
Bengali Kayasta family. But the key context,
as our sources point out, is that his family
were part of the Brahmo Samaj movement. And that
background is, well... It's absolutely essential
to understanding his lifelong fight against discrimination.
The Brahma Samaj was a reformist Hindu movement.
What does that mean exactly, a reformist movement
at that time? It was dedicated to modernizing,
to questioning dogma, and critically, to rejecting
the rigidity of the caste system. Bose's father
was a high -ranking civil servant, and he was
deeply influenced by this progressive mindset.
And this mindset led to a very deliberate decision
about Bose's education. His father just rejected
the prevalent aristocratic status symbol of immediately
sending your kids to expensive English language
schools. He did. Instead, Bose was sent to a
local Bengali language school first. A vernacular
school. A vernacular school. And this decision,
it profoundly shaped his entire worldview. In
that school, he was sharing his bench with children
from every social stratum. The son of a Muslim
attendant? The son of a fisherman? Exactly. There
were no social hierarchies in that classroom.
And he talked about this later in life at the
Big Cranpore Conference in 1915. Right. He said
he was spellbound by their stories. Yes. These
simple, profound stories his playmates told.
They weren't about politics or social climbing.
There were stories about nature, about birds,
animals, aquatic creatures. And he directly credited
that environment with cultivating this really
intense, keen interest in how nature works. And
crucially, with instilling a lifelong rejection
of caste or community discrimination. This wasn't
just some abstract philosophy for him. It was
a lived experience. So when he eventually did
enter the more orthodox world of higher education,
he was already carrying that egalitarian view
with him. He was. He went to the Hare School
in Kolkata and then St. Xavier's College, where
the Jesuit father, Eugene Lafont, really fostered
his innate curiosity in the natural sciences.
That set his formal path. But that path took
a little bit of a detour, didn't it? He went
to England. A slight but very significant detour.
He enrolled in medicine in London, but he had
to quit. He had chronic ill health. And the thinking
is it was possibly from chemical exposure in
the dissection rooms. And this turned out to
be one of those, you know, beneficial failures.
Completely. Yeah. Because it forced him to choose
between the civil service, which was the prestigious
expected path, and pure scholarship. And he wanted
to follow his father into the Indian civil service.
But his father actually forbade it. He did. His
father detreed that Bowes should be a scholar
who would rule nobody but himself. A powerful
statement. It really is. And that set him on
the course toward Christ's College, Cambridge,
where he studied natural sciences. His advisor
was the esteemed Lord Rayleigh. A Nobel laureate.
A Nobel laureate known for his incredibly fastidious
experimental methods. So Bose got degrees from
Cambridge and University College London, trained
by giants like James Dewar. So you have this
combination of extremely high caliber, state
of the art Western scientific training. Coupled
with these deeply progressive, anti -discriminatory
Bengali roots. It just created this, well, this
truly combustible personality who was ready to
challenge the system. And that challenge started.
What, almost immediately upon his return to India
in 1885? Instantly. He was appointed as an officiating
professor of physics at Presidency College, Calcutta.
But the historical record is clear. The college
principal and the director of education were
very hesitant. Because those positions in the
Imperial Education Service were pretty much reserved
for Europeans. The racial discrimination wasn't
hidden. It was institutionalized policy. The
standard rule was that an Indian professor was
paid only two -thirds the salary of a European
peer. OK, so that's already a huge injustice.
But then they compounded it. Because Bose's appointment
was initially temporary, an officiating role,
they unilaterally halved his pay again. So wait,
he's doing the exact same work, teaching a massive
26 hours a week. 26 hours. Yes, his European
colleagues. But he's getting one -third of their
salary. That's just systemic injustice right
there in the administration. And this is where
his Brahmo -influenced philosophy just collided
head -on with that system, rather than quietly
accept it or lobby internally. Which is what
most people would have done. Oh, absolutely.
But he made this extraordinary, almost passive
-aggressive stand that lasted for 1 ,095 days.
He refused to accept any salary for the first
three years. Not a penny. He just worked. He
taught his classes, he did his research, and
he treated his job as an honorary position until
they recognized his true worth. What an incredible
personal sacrifice. How did he even support himself
during that time? Well, we don't have perfect
financial records, but we know he had family
support. His focus was just absolute. He made
this three -year protest a silent referendum
on the principle of equality itself. His reasoning
being that if his work was valuable, they'd have
to pay him eventually. Exactly. Or if they fired
him, that would also be a kind of victory because
it would expose the system's inherent unfairness.
And his integrity. It eventually forced the administration's
hand. It did. After three years, his performance
and his popularity with the students were just
undeniable. His point was made permanent with
retrospective effect. Which means he got all
three years of back pay in a single lump sum.
A remarkable, sustained victory. against that
bureaucracy but the institutional struggle didn't
end there did it even after the salary was sorted
not at all despite his success in the classroom
the college administration actively resisted
his research they argued it distracted him from
his heavy teaching load so he was constantly
struggling for funding for equipment constantly
he often had to use his own limited resources
and it's really important here to note the support
he got from the social activist and hindu None.
Sister Nivedita. She helped fund his research.
She did. And that kept his scientific output
alive during this period of intense institutional
resistance so that his foundational discoveries,
the things we're about to talk about, they weren't
built in some state of the art government funded
lab. They were built in a small room fueled by
personal savings and just radical determination.
OK, so let's move from those institutional battles
to the scientific revolutions that came out of
that small lab in Calcutta. We need to look at
how Bose basically created the foundation for
modern wireless communication, starting with
inventable light. Right. So by the mid 1890s,
the world was electrified by the work of scientists
like Oliver Lodge, who was demonstrating the
transmission and detection of long radio waves.
And this immediately inspired Bose. It did. But
he wanted to move beyond just simple detection.
He wanted to start studying the optical properties
of these electromagnetic waves. Like light, how
it reflects, refracts, polarizes. Exactly. But
to properly examine things like polarization
and reflection in radio waves, you need wavelengths
that are much, much shorter than the standard
long waves being used for telegraphy. So his
whole goal was to make radio waves behave like
light. And to do that, he had to miniaturize
them. Precisely. And his major breakthrough,
and this is where his just staggering technical
foresight comes in, was successfully reducing
the waves down to the millimeter level. Specifically
around five millimeter wavelength. Yes, which
is firmly in the microwave range. Yeah. He was
operating at frequencies as high as 60 gigahertz,
to put that in context for you. That's 60 billion
cycles per second? In the 1890s. It's almost
unbelievable. So to send a signal. at 60 gigahertz
and have it travel what was 75 feet through two
walls, he must have faced an immense technical
challenge. What was harder, creating a powerful
enough transmitter or a sensitive enough detector?
You know, both were monumental challenges, especially
with the tools he had available in 19th century
India. But the transmission side was perhaps
the most demanding, just in terms of sheer precision.
Because at 5 millimeters, everything has to be
perfectly scaled down. Perfectly. I mean, the
list of specific components Bose invented just
to handle this frequency range, it reads like
a modern microwave engineering textbook. Okay,
so let's list some of those. What did he actually
invent? All right, he invented the waveguide.
Which is basically plumbing for invisible light,
right? A tube to guide the waves. That's a great
way to put it. He developed horn antennas to
efficiently transmit and receive the energy.
He created dielectric lenses, which are prisms
made of materials like sulfur or pitch, to focus
the waves, just like optical lenses focus visible
light. And he also created polarizers. Various
polarizers, yes. And critically, he was the first
to use a primitive semiconductor junction for
detection. I want to pause on the foresight there
because the sources are really clear on this.
After Bose's initial success with these millimeter
wavelengths, further work in this range was,
what, virtually non -existent for the next 50
years. 50. He was operating in a technology space
that wouldn't become practical for things like
radar and satellite communication until the 1940s
and 50s. That gap just underscores his genius.
He literally built a working 60 gigahertz system
decades before the infrastructure or the material
science or even the institutional support existed
to pursue it. Right. And for context, much of
his original equipment, which is still housed
at the Bose Institute in Kolkata, would look
instantly recognizable to a modern electrical
engineer working on 5G or satellite communications
today. The fact that concepts from his 1897 papers
are directly incorporated into receivers on modern
radio telescopes today, that really confirms
his foundational status. It absolutely does.
The science was profound, but Bose knew how to
make it visible. He was great at converting this
cutting -edge physics into spectacular public
theater. He really was. In November 1895, at
the town hall of Kolkata, he put on this vivid
public demonstration of his millimeter -range
microwaves. And this demonstration was designed
to silence the critics, the people who doubted
that invisible light could actually penetrate
solid objects. Precisely. He transmitted his
waves over a substantial distance. 23 meters,
about 75 feet. It made them pass through two
intervening walls of the hall. And what happened
on the receiving end? What was the payoff? The
waves were received by an apparatus that immediately
did two very visible things. It rang a bell.
And for the dramatic finale, it ignited gunpowder
in a closed room. So this wasn't just detection.
It was wireless controlled signaling that defied
physical barriers. It was. The Englishman newspaper,
which covered the event in 1896, they were so
stunned they speculated his work could revolutionize
the entire system of coast lighting. And then
there was that moment, that theatrical moment,
when the waves passed through the body of Lieutenant
Governor Sir William McKenzie. A superb rhetorical
and physical demonstration. It showed properties
that were just utterly alien to the public at
the time, this idea of waves passing right through
human tissue. But beyond these dramatic shows,
he was also pioneering these deep theoretical
conceptual leaps, which brings us to his 1898
experiment using a... A twisted jute structure?
Yes. This sounds incredibly low -tech compared
to his high -frequency transmitters. What was
he trying to do with twisted jute? He was studying
how waves behaved when passing through complex
media, specifically the optical rotation of microwaves.
He was exploring the properties of what we now
call Chiral media. Chirality. So that's like
handedness. Exactly. Like your right hand can't
perfectly overlay your left. A chiral structure
interacts differently with wave depending on
their polarization and direction. So by twisting
jute fibers, he was creating a material with
a very specific engineered internal structure.
He was. He was using plant fibers to construct
this intricate, repeating geometric pattern of
synthetic crystal, essentially. This seemingly
simple experiment was a foundational step toward
understanding and engineering metamaterials.
Metamaterials, which are these engineered substances
designed to have properties not found in nature,
like bending light around an object, the things
you hear about with cloaking devices. That's
the futuristic application, yes. Bose was designing
structures at the milliliter scale to control
the propagation of electromagnetic waves based
on the material's geometry, not just its chemical
composition. It's an incredible conceptual leap.
He's connecting material physics directly to
the most futuristic concepts in modern wave science.
A century ahead of his time. As groundbreaking
as his pure physics was, his next invention immediately
threw him into this massive commercial and industrial
race for wireless communication. A race he personally
had zero interest in winning. Right. So let's
get into Bose's diode detector and his... philosophical
stance toward invention. So Bose needed a reliable
way to detect his short radio waves, something
much more consistent than the crude spark gaps
and early detectors others were using. In 1899,
he announced his development of the self -recovering
mercury coherer. Okay, let's break that down
for the listener. First, what is a coherer and
why did it need to be self -recovering? A coherer,
historically, was the key receiver in early radio.
It's usually just a small glass tube with loose
metal filings in it. Normally, these filings
have high electrical resistance. When a radio
wave hits them, the filings cohere, they stick
together, and the resistance suddenly drops dramatically.
that drop signals that you've received a wave.
So what's the problem? The problem is once they
cohered, they stayed stuck. You had to physically
tap the tube. There was usually a little automated
hammer to decohere the filings and reset the
resistance to get it ready for the next signal.
So that manual tapping limited the speed of transmission.
Massively. And Bose's innovation was the self
-recovering mercury coherer. He replaced the
metal filings with a tiny, very delicate arrangement
of iron, mercury, and sometimes carbon contacts.
And how did that work? When the wave hit, the
conductivity would briefly increase, but the
surface tension of the mercury would naturally
pull the contacts apart almost instantly, resetting
the device without any mechanical tapping. So
that speed and efficiency made it revolutionary
for continuous signal reception. It was. And
furthermore, this device was later recognized
as the first patented solid -state diode detector.
He filed for a British patent in 1901 and a U
.S. patent in 1904. But the truly staggering
aspect of this is his simultaneous use of a galena
crystal lead sulfide as a detector. Right. Why
is the galena crystal so important in this story?
Because Bills was the first person to use a naturally
occurring semiconductor junction. a mineral,
to detect radio waves. Before this, detection
relied on these metal filing devices or on vacuum
tubes. The crystal detector is the direct lineal
ancestor of every modern semiconductor device.
The transistor, the microchip. The entire foundation
of modern computing and communication. Which
brings to mind that quote from the Nobel laureate
Sir Neville Mott that we found in our sources.
Oh, it's a great one. He said, J .C. Bowes was
at least 60 years ahead of his time. In fact,
he had anticipated the existence of P -type and
N -type semiconductors. And that's not hyperbole.
It's a technical acknowledgement of his priority.
He understood that certain materials, like galena,
had these properties that made them better wave
rectifiers than traditional conductors. He was
intuitively working with the principles of semiconductor
physics decades before the field was even formalized.
But despite holding the key to the future of
communication, the sources all highlight his
profound disinterest in commercializing any of
it. And this connects directly back to that philosophy
we talked about in the first segment. Bose viewed
his research as being focused on the nature of
the phenomenon, a universal truth to be shared.
Unlike Marconi. Right. Unlike Guglielmo Marconi,
who was aggressively pursuing commercial dominance,
Bose just preferred to lecture and publish his
findings openly. A friend in the U .S. did persuade
him to file a patent on his detector, but Bose
just allowed that U .S. patent to lapse. He wasn't
interested. He basically offered the technology
to the world for free. And that lack of commercial
drive is exactly what led to one of the biggest
attribution disputes in early radio history.
It sets the stage perfectly for the Italian Navy
Cohere scandal. Marconi needed a highly sensitive,
reliable detector for his big transatlantic wireless
transmission attempt. He did. And Marconi's success
in receiving the Morse code letter S on December
12, 1901 at Signal Hill, Newfoundland, it was
a landmark moment. But the device he used to
receive that signal was heavily influenced by
Bose's work. It was a modified version of Bose's
self -recovering detector, the iron -mercury
-iron setup. Yes, or iron -mercury -carbon. That
was the core of it. So how did Marconi get his
hands on this specific design? In mid -1901,
he got the design through Lieutenant Luigi Solari
of the Royal Italian Navy. Solari's modification
was just to encase the mercury droplet between
electrodes inside a sealed glass tube, which
made it more robust for field use. Marconi then
filed his own patent on this modified device.
And the controversy, the Italian Navy coherer
scandal, it erupted in 1902. When claims emerged
that Marconi wasn't the originator, priority
was suddenly attributed to other people. All
sorts of other people. A naval signalman named
Paolo Castelli, a professor Tommaso Tomasina,
who had also experimented with mercury -based
coherers. And this is where the detailed historical
analysis, especially from organizations like
the IAEE, really provides the necessary clarification.
It establishes Bose's priority. Yes, because
the crucial element wasn't just using mercury.
It was the design implementation. What was the
specific technical distinction that proved Bose's
priority over someone like Tomasina? It was the
integration with the telephone receiver. Bose's
1899 design was built for continuous auditory
detection. You could listen to the signal. Which
you would need for his high -frequency waves.
You'd have to have it. And the historical records
confirm that Thomasina's earlier, simpler mercury
experiments, they lacked this crucial telephone
integration. So it was Bohe's combination of
the self -recovering high -speed contact with
the continuous auditory output that provided
the sensitivity Marconi needed. That's what made
his design the technical ancestor of the device
that heard the S cross the Atlantic. And Marconi,
you know, citing commercial secrecy, just omitted
references to Bose in his accounts. He focused
on Solari's modification. And that omission.
coupled with Bose's own indifference to patenting,
allowed the history to be obscured for nearly
a century. It really raises an important question,
doesn't it? How often does the sheer gravitational
pull of commercial success just overshadow fundamental
non -commercial scientific discovery? I think
about that a lot. Bose allowed his technology
to become a global public good. And in doing
so, he allowed others to achieve fame and fortune
based on his core technical leap. His reward
wasn't wealth, but the pure satisfaction of understanding
the phenomenon. So now we cross this incredible
intellectual divide. After pioneering the physics
of invisible light and semiconductors, Bose just
pivots entirely. To biology, specifically botanical
responses. He took the same rigor and electrical
precision he applied to 60 gigahertz waves and
he applied it to a leaf. It's an amazing shift.
His transition was motivated by a core hypothesis,
right? That the principles of response were universal.
That was his driving idea. His major contribution
to biophysics was demonstrating that the conduction
of stimuli in plants, things like a physical
injury, heat, chemical agents, that it was primarily
electrical in nature. Not purely chemical, which
was the prevailing theory. Exactly. He argued
it was electrical and that it behaved in a manner
parallel to animal nerve tissues. So the botanical
community at the time, they largely believed
plant reactions were these slow, purely chemical
processes. And Bose essentially looked at a plant
and said, I bet it has a nervous system, too.
And to prove it, he had to create instruments
of just unheard -of sensitivity. This is where
we introduce the Cresco graph. His ingenious
invention. The sources describe it as an automatic
recorder capable of registering extremely slight
movements. But how did he get it sensitive enough
to register these tiny changes in plant growth?
Well, the mechanism was just a brilliant piece
of mechanical and optical engineering. It combined
a very fine system of levers with a clockwork
mechanism, which recorded the plant's movement
onto a smoked glass plate. But the key was the
magnification. The key was the magnification.
The system had a tiny gear train and used optical
magnification, so it was capable of registering
movements as small as one hundred thousandth
of an inch. By compounding mechanical magnification
with projection, the Kresger graph could effectively
magnify a plant's minute movement up to 10 ,000
times. 10 ,000 times. So if a plant grew one
millimeter, the recorder would register 10 meters.
That's the level of sensitivity that allowed
him to capture these instantaneous responses
that were previously completely invisible. That
speed and sensitivity let him measure plant response
to stimuli with the precision of a physicist
measuring an electrical current. And he focused
on plants that were known for movement, like
the sensitive plant Mimosa pudica. The one that
famously folds its leaves when you touch it.
And also the telegraph plant, Desmodium gyrans,
whose tiny side leaflets are constantly twitching.
And the results he got were revolutionary. He
used the Crescograph to generate these electrical
readings, showing a direct, immediate response
to injury or stimulus. Exactly. He was documenting
the electrical nature of these responses. Essentially,
he was measuring action potentials. Electrical
spikes, like the ones generated by an animal
nerve or muscle fiber? The very same phenomenon.
He recorded the quivering of injured plants,
which he interpreted as a measurable physiological
response akin to pain or shock in animal tissue.
So just to be clear, what is an action potential
in this context? Think of it as a sudden, rapid,
temporary change in the voltage across a cell
membrane. It's a rapid firing of an electrical
signal. In animal biology, This is how nerves
communicate. And Bose was recording this exact
electrical phenomenon in plants. He was. He argued
that an injury or a stimulus caused ion channels
in the plant cells to open, generating an electrical
pulse that traveled through the plant tissue,
similar to an animal impulse, just much slower.
And his research went beyond just injury. He
studied seasonal effects, the action of microwaves
on plant tissues. And how plants move toward
light heliotropism. His work on that is a beautiful
example of detailed measurement. He invented
a torsional recorder to study it. And what did
she find? He found that when light was applied
to one side of a sunflower, it caused turgor,
that's the internal water pressure that defines
cell rigidity, to increase on the opposite side.
Which is what pushed the stem toward the light
source. Exactly. He was mapping the physics of
movement within plant life, revealing this highly
sophisticated system of hydraulic and electrical
control. And his measurements of electrical response
in plants, they allowed him to make an even bolder
claim, a philosophical and scientific claim that
blurred the line between biology and physics
entirely. Yes, in what he called the metal cell
analogy. Right. So Bose believed that fundamental
physical laws governed all matter. If living
matter responded with an electrical curve of
fatigue and recovery. Why shouldn't nonliving
matter subjected to similar stresses? So he performed
a comparative study of the fatigue response of
various metals and organic tissue in plants.
So he's taking metals like iron and subjecting
them to mechanical stress, heat stress, electrical
stress. What similarities did he actually find?
He noted these striking quantifiable similarities
in the cyclical fatigue and recovery response.
If you repeatedly stimulate a muscle, it tires
and the electrical response weakens. Given time,
it recovers. Bose found that if he repeatedly
sent electrical pulses through a metal wire,
the metal's characteristic electrical response
curve, its change in resistance, would also weaken.
It showed fatigue. And given time, it would recover
its initial response to this. I understand the
measurement of fatigue in metal, but how did
he justify that leap scientifically to the skeptics?
I mean, that seems to negate the difference between
a machine and a life form. But that was the entire
point of his 1902 book, Response in the Living
and Nonliving. He argued that what we traditionally
define as response or irritability is merely
a physical characteristic that's measurable through
electrical language. The differences are of degree,
not of kind. And the most profound part of this
analogy involved his use of poison and anesthetics.
That's the part that's truly mind -bending. He
demonstrated that when anesthetics like chloroform
were applied to plant cells, that characteristic
electrical response curve to a stimulus would
decrease and eventually just disappear. Just
like an animal losing consciousness. Precisely.
The same thing happened when he applied poison.
The cells just ceased to react electrically.
But the kicker, the true moment of blurring that
line, came when he treated metals with chemical
agents. Yes. He observed the same exact response
when applying specific chemical agents to metals.
When he treated metals with, for instance, oxalic
acid, the metal's ability to exhibit its characteristic
electrical response curve was suppressed or eliminated.
So he was using the language of biology, anesthesia,
poison, fatigue, recovery to describe physical
changes in a piece of inert metal and vice versa.
Here's where it gets really interesting. He essentially
treated a piece of metal like a nerve cell and
a nerve cell like an electrochemical device.
He was blurring the boundaries using the universal
language of electrical response. And his conclusion
was that the electrical impulse was a universal
characteristic of all matter. which was a radical
science that went completely against the dominant
Western mechanistic views of life. It's important
to remember this wasn't just a metaphor for him.
He was measuring precise, quantifiable electrical
changes. For Bose, the transition from the non
-living to the living was not a sudden chasm,
but a gradual slope. governed by the same set
of physical laws. It's clear that Bose was driven
by something much larger than just personal recognition
or even specific scientific fields. He was driven
by a commitment to experimental science in India.
Absolutely. Which brings us to his legacy as
an institution builder. He understood that for
science to flourish in India, it required dedicated
interdisciplinary infrastructure free from the
bureaucratic and colonial restrictions he had
been fighting his entire life. So in 1917, he
established the Bose Institute in Kolkata. And
he served as its director for two decades until
his death. And our sources note that this was
Asia's first interdisciplinary research center
built specifically to study the unity of physics
and biology. What was the underlying statement
he was making by founding this institute? It
was a direct challenge to that colonial era belief
that the Indian mind was only suited for theoretical
or metaphysical speculation and would shy away
from. rigorous experimental science. His inaugural
dedication was incredibly powerful. He called
it not merely a laboratory, but a temple. A temple
dedicated to nature. He declared, and I'm quoting
here, He was offering a space where research
could be pursued at the highest level, proving
the capability of the Indian scientific mind.
This institution was a crucial national statement
of scientific sovereignty. And his literary output
during this period was also pretty prolific.
Beyond his huge scientific texts like Response
in the Living and Nonliving and The Nervous Mechanism
of Plants, he also branched into fiction. He
did. In 1896, he wrote Nirudhushir Kahini, which
means Story of the Missing One. He later expanded
it into Palatak Tufan or Runaway Seastorm. And
this work is recognized as the first example
of Bengali science fiction. The father of Bengali
sci -fi. He was speculating about the future
implications of science, things like weather
control and natural disasters, even as he was
inventing the present. It just shows this holistic
mind that sought not just to analyze the world,
but to imagine its potential. Despite the controversies
over attribution, the honors did start to accumulate,
especially later in his life, solidifying his
status as a major global scientist. They did.
His recognition included Companion of the Order
of the Indian Empire in 1903, he was made a Knight
Bachelor in 1917, and in 1920, he was named a
Fellow of the Royal Society. The highest accolades
of the time. But the most important recognition
often comes decades later, doesn't it, when the
historical record finally gets corrected? That's
often the case. And his experimental work in
millimeter band radio was recognized in 2012
as an IE milestone in electrical and computer
engineering. Which was the first such designation
granted in India. Yeah. And that IE milestone
is incredibly significant because it confirms,
through rigorous technical analysis, his priority
in the development of microwave technology and
the crystal detector. He's also received a lot
of cultural legacy markers. A Google Doodle in
2016, a crater on the moon is named in his honor.
And there's that fascinating tidbit from 2018
where he was on the nomination list for the redesign
of the UK 50 -pound note for his work enabling
Wi -Fi development. It just illustrates his belated
but powerful recognition as a key father of modern
wireless communication. And finally, you have
to return to his core philosophical view. It
underpins everything. It explains why he fought
the system on salary but gave away his technology
for free. He drew inspiration from the epic Mahabharata,
specifically the figure of Karna. Yes, valuing
the higher and higher idea of conflict and defeat.
He said that worldly success often seems small
compared to the true success born of defeat.
What a perspective. His core belief was that
the only real lasting advantage is to fight fair,
never to take crooked ways, but keep to the straight
path, whatever be in the way. This integrity
just perfectly explains his decision to forego
patents and commercial game. His victory was
internal. It was. Establishing truth through
rigorous experimentation, not external wealth
or fame. He knew that even if others took the
immediate credit for the coherer, the truth of
his fundamental discovery would eventually stand
on its own. What an incredible journey through
a life that just defied categorization. Sir Jagadish
Chandra Bose was the physicist who took radio
waves to 60 gigahertz. The engineer who fathered
the crystal radio detector. The biophysicist
who made plants speak through electrical response
and the visionary who founded Asia's first interdisciplinary
research center. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, Bose demonstrated that a true scientist
operates without artificial barriers. He moved
seamlessly from material science and electromagnetism
to plant physiology. Forcing us to fundamentally
reconsider what we define as life and response.
His work showed that universal physical laws
govern reaction across the entire spectrum of
matter, from a piece of metal to a sensitive
plant leaf. So what does this all mean for you,
the learner? It means the seamless wireless communication
you rely on every single day, powering your phone
and your Wi -Fi, has deep, forgotten roots. Roots
in the hands of a dedicated scholar in Calcutta
in the 1890s who refused to compromise his principles.
And it means that the plant life around you is
far more electrically responsive, far more sensitive
and interconnected with the physical world than
you likely ever imagined? His legacy isn't just
his inventions. It's his ethics. He valued scientific
principle and integrity over profit and patent
protection. Bose believed in fighting fair and
accepting defeat as a pathway to true success.
So given his experience with the coherer controversy,
where his technical priority was established
decades after the commercial success of others,
what contemporary scientific field currently
battling for recognition or against overwhelming
commercial pressure might hold a Bose -like revelation
that history is only just starting to acknowledge?
Something to think about. Something to think
about as you connect wirelessly and maybe, you
know, look a little more closely at the nearest
house plant.