Jagadish Chandra Bose's 158th Birthday

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose,^[1] CSI,^[2] CIE,^[3] FRS,^[4] also spelled Jagdish and Jagadis^[5] (/boʊs/;^[6] Bengali pronunciation: [dʒɔgod̪iʃ tʃɔnd̪ro bosu]; 30 November 1858 – 23 November 1937), was a Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist and archaeologist, and an early writer of science fiction.^[7] Living in British India, he pioneered the investigation of radio and microwaveoptics, made significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent.^[8]IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science.^[9] Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction, and also invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the moon has been named in his honour.^[10]

Born in Munshiganj, Bengal Presidency during the British Raj (present-day Bangladesh),^[11] Bose graduated from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. He then went to the University of London to study medicine, but could not pursue studies in medicine because of health problems. Instead, he conducted his research with the Nobel Laureate Lord Rayleigh at Cambridge and returned to India. He then joined the Presidency College of 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 remarkable progress in his research of remote wirelesssignalling and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio signals. However, instead of trying to gain commercial benefit from this invention, Bose made his inventions public in order to allow others to further develop his research.

Bose subsequently made a number of pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli, and thereby scientifically proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues. Although Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions because of peer pressure, his objections to any form of patenting was well known. 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).