Early Life

• Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in a Bengali Kayastha family in Munsiganj (Bikrampur), Bengal Presidency, (present-day Bangladesh) on 30 November 1858.

  

• His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was a leading member of the Brahmo Samaj and worked as a deputy magistrate and assistant commissioner in Faridpur, Bardhaman and other places.
• Jagadish Chandra Bose attended the village school till he was 11. Bose joined the Hare School in 1869 and then St. Xavier’s School at Kolkata.

Education

• In 1875, he passed the Entrance Examination (equivalent to school graduation) of the University of Calcutta. Soon,  he got admission to St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta.
• Bose wanted to go to England to compete for the Indian Civil Service. However, his father, a civil servant himself, cancelled the plan.
• Having obtained his B.A. in physical sciences, twenty two year old Bose left for London, to obtain a medical degree. 
• However, he had to quit because of ill health. The odour in the dissection rooms is also said to have exacerbated his illness.
• He then obtained his B.A. degree in physics from Christ College, Cambridge.

Professional Life

• Jagadish Chandra Bose returned to India in 1885 and joined Presidency College, Kolkata as an Assistant Professor of Physics, where he remained till 1915.

  

• There was a peculiar practice in the college at that time. The college paid Indian teachers one third of what the British teachers were paid. So Bose refused his salary but worked for three years. The fourth year he was paid in full!
• Jagadish Chandra Bose was an excellent teacher, extensively using scientific demonstrations in class.
• Some of his students, such as S. N. Bose went on to become famous physicists themselves.

Scientific Work

• During this period, Bose also started doing original scientific work in the area of microwaves, carrying out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarization.
• The first remarkable aspect of Bose’s follow-up microwave research was that he reduced the waves to the millimetre level (about 5 mm wavelength). He realised the disadvantages of long waves for studying their light-like properties.
• In 1895, two years before Marconi’s demonstration, Bose demonstrated wireless communication using radio waves.
• During a November 1894 public demonstration at Town Hall of Kolkata, Bose ignited gunpowder and rang a bell at a distance using millimetre range wavelength microwaves
• Jagadish Chandra Bose invented many of the microwave components familiar today – waveguides, horn antennas, polarizers, dielectric lenses and prisms, and even semiconductor detectors of electromagnetic radiation in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
• Jagadish Chandra Bose also suggested the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, which was confirmed in 1944.
• He then turned his attention to response phenomena in plants. He showed that not only animal but vegetable tissues, produce similar electric response under different kinds of stimuli – mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical.
• Jagadish Chandra Bose performed a comparative study of the fatigue response of various metals and organic tissue in plants. He subjected metals to a combination of mechanical, thermal, chemical, and electrical stimuli and noted the similarities between metals and cells.
• British king Knighted Bose in 1917. Soon, Royal Society elected him as Fellow of the Royal Society, London.
• Jagadish Chandra Bose died on 23 November 1937 (aged 78) Giridih, Bengal Presidency, British India (now Giridih, Jharkhand, India)

Legacy

• His work may have contributed to the development of radio communication.
• Jagadish Chandra Bose is also credited with discovering millimetre length electromagnetic waves and being a pioneer in the field of biophysics.
• Bose had worked all along without the right kind of scientific instruments and laboratory. For a long time he had been thinking of building a laboratory. The result was the establishment of the Bose Research Institute in Kolkata. It continues to be a famous centre of research in basic sciences.
• On 30 November 2016, Goggle celebrated 158th birth by showcasing Google Doodle on Google homepage.