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Sir Jagadish
Chandra Bose
Born: November 30, 1858
Died: November 23, 1937
Achievements: He was the
first to prove that plants too have feelings. He invented wireless telegraphy a
year before Marconi patented his invention. [1]
Jagadish Basu's ancestral home was Rarikhal, in Munshiganj district,
but he was born in Mymensingh on
November 30, 1858. where his father was posted as a deputy magistrate.
After obtaining a BSc. degree from St. Xavier's College in Calcutta, Jagadish
Basu went on to Cambridge where he obtained a Tripos in Natural Sciences in
1894. He returned to India and joined the Presidency College Physics
Department. Here, besides teaching, he carried on his original experiments on
radio waves and later in plant physiology and biophysics. It was while he was
carrying on experiments on the quasi-optical properties of very short radio
waves in the Presidency College laboratories, that he made improvements on the
coherer, an early form of radio detector, by attaching a mercury-filled tube
and also connecting a telephonic receiver.[2]
Jagadish Basu who had worked on
properties of radio waves and perfected. An early form of radio detector- his
mercurycoheter- was bypassed by Marconi, who had based his experiments an
wireless telegraphy , on a further modification of Basu's coherer. Iii the
process Basu's contribution was not acknowledged by Marconi who went on to per.
fed his system, build a company based on his discoveries and inventions, and
share the Nobel Prize with the German Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1909.[2]
While Marconi received his
recognition with the award of the Nobel Prize, the unacknowledged and now
side-tracked researcher and innovator in radio waves and wireless telegraphy,
the disillusioned Basu, turned his attention to physiology of plants. Here also
his genius led him to invent highly sensitive instruments for detection of
minute responses by living organisms to external stimuli and enabled him to
anticipate parallelism between animal and plant tissues noted by later
blophysicists. These instruments produced some striking results, such as Basus
demonstration of an apparent power of feeling in plants, exemplified by the
quivering of injured plants. Among his books on biophysics are Response in the
Living and Non-Living (1902) and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926). Jagdish Chandra Bose showed
experimentally plants too have life. He invented an instrument to record the
pulse of plants and connected it to a plant. The plant, with its roots, was
carefully picked up and dipped up to its stem in a vessel containing bromide, a
poison. The plant's pulse beat, which the instrument recorded as a steady
to-and-fro movement like the pendulum of a clock, began to grow unsteady. Soon,
the spot vibrated violently and then came to a sudden stop. The plant had died
because of poison.[1][2]
Although Jagdish Chandra Bose did
invaluable work in Science, his work was recognized in the country only when
the Western world recognized its importance. He founded the Bose Institute at
Calcutta, devoted mainly to the study of plants. Today, the Institute carries
research on other fields too.
Reference:
1
= Jagdish Chandra Bose Biography
2 = Jagadish
Chandra Basu, the low-profile genius
By Mahbub Husain Khan
Thanks :)
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