Ahead Of His Time

Experts celebrate the centenary of 
J. C. Bose's landmark patent, reports Biplab Das 

On March 29, 1904, Jagadish Chandra Bose was granted a patent for inventing a detector for electrical disturbances. To celebrate the centenary of that landmark event of Indian science, the Bose Institute, together with the state government and the Department of Science and Technology organised a three-day symposium on, 'Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose:The Scientific Legacy' at the lecture hall of the Institute during March 29-31. 

Heinrich Hertz and His Successors, a book by Sir Oliver Lodge, inspired Bose to undertake research on microwaves, a subject on which both Hertz and Lodge did a lot of work. "His interest in microwaves made him develop a number of detectors, which could receive the signals of tiny electromagnetic waves," said Prof. S. Krishnan of the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, in his speech on 'The Detectors of Sir J. C. Bose'. 

In 1894, Bose converted a small enclosure adjoining bathroom at the Presidency College into a laboratory. "In that makeshift laboratory, Bose developed a device called a radiator, which generated microwaves of 5-mm wavelength," Krishnan said, adding that Bose used ordinary items like a twisted bundle of jute for his research. The results of Bose's study, first demonstrated at the Asiatic Society in May 1895, were later published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in November 1897. 

The great scientists believed in the free flow of science. "So he made public what he discovered," said Prof. M. G. K. Menon, president, Indian Statistical Institute, in his inaugural address. According to him, radio transmission was also demonstrated before the Governor-General in Calcutta in 1896. The transmission, from the Presidency College to Science College, covered a distance of about five kilometers. Bose wrote to his teacher, Lord Rayleigh, about his research. 

Rayleigh immediately grasped the far-reaching implications of his student's research and invited him to present his experiments before the Royal Institution and other societies in the UK. Another of Bose's inventions - the mercury coherer with a telephone, which Marconi used - was reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, on April 27, 1899. This happened two years before's Marconi's first wireless communication on December 12, 1901. 

"In January 1998, a report published in the journal of the US-based Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) showed that Marconi had used the semiconductor diode device invented by Bose," said Prof. B. R. Nag of Calcutta University who spoke on 'Semiconductor Physics from the Time of J. C. Bose Till Date'. 

Talking about Bose's apathy towards patenting his inventions, Dr. Shymal Chakraborty, from the chemistry department, Calcutta University, remarked, "Patenting them would have made him a millionaire. His apathy moved two of his lady friends, British-born Margaret Noble (better known as Sister Nivedita) and American-born Sara Bull, who in 1904 obtained an American patent in Bose's name for his single-point contact receiver." 

After plagiarising Bose's invention, Marconi patented it in his name and went on to share the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics, revealed the IEEE report. "It shows how urgent it is to patent an invention," said Prof. P. K. Ray of the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases and former director of the Bose Institute. "If vital knowledge related to inventions is not protected by patents, it can be easily stolen," Ray commented, giving examples of turmeric and neem. 

Explaining how Bose's mind travelled beyond the confines of the laboratory, Dr. Ramesh Balsubramanyam, from the Raman Research Institute, said, "He speculated on the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the sun. He also suggested that either the solar or terrestrial atmosphere might be responsible for the lack of success so far in detection of such radiation. Solar radiation was not detected until 1942." Now, millimeter-wave astronomy has flourished to the extent that it throws light on the origin of the Universe. 

Bose's inventions still find use in modern-day equipment. Prisms, lenses and semiconductor detectors of electromagnetic waves were all invented in the last decade of the 19th century. Some concepts from his original 1897 papers have been incorporated into a new signal receiver now in use at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's 12-metre telescope in Arizona, US, showing, once again, how much ahead the master was of his time.