Jagdish Chandra Bose was born on November 30, 1858 in Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). His father Bhagaban Chandra Bose was a Deputy Magistrate. Bose received early education in a vernacular village school. He was sent to Kolkata at the age of 11 to learn English and was educated at St. Xavier’s School and College. He was a brilliant student. He passed BA in Physical Sciences in 1879.
In 1880, Bose went to England. He studied medicine at London University for a year but gave it up because of his own ill health. Within a year, he moved to Cambridge to take up a scholarship to study Natural Science at Christ College, Cambridge. In 1885, he returned from abroad with a B.Sc. degree and natural Science Tripos ( a special course of study at Cambridge).
After his return, he got a lecturer’s job at Presidency College, Kolkata with a salary half that of his English colleagues.
He accepted the job but refused to draw his salary in protest. After there years the college ultimately conceded to his demand and Jagdish Chandra Bose
was paid full salary from the date he joined the college. As a teacher, Jagdish Chandra Bose was very popular and engaged the interest of his students by making extensive use of scientific demonstrations. Many of his students at the Presidency College later became famous in their own right and these included Satyendra Nath Bose and Meghnad Saha.
In 1894, Jagdish Chandra Bose decided to devote himself to pure research. He converted a small enclosure adjoining a
bathroom in the Presidency College into a laboratory. He carried out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarisation. It would not be wrong to call him as the inventor of wireless telegraphy. In 1895, a year before Guglielmo Marconi patented this invention, he had demonstrated its
functioning in public. Jagdish Chandra Bose later switched from physics to the study of metals and then plants. He
was the first to prove that plants too have feelings. He invented an instrument to record the pulse of plants. Although
Jagdish Chandra Bose did invaluable work in Science, his work was recognised in the country only when the Western world recognised its importance. He founded the Bose Institute at Calcutta, devoted mainly to the study of plants. Today, the institute carries research in other fields too. Jagdish Chandra Bose died on November 23, 1937.
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