Jagadish Chandra Bose Rang a Bell and Fired Gunpowder by Radio Waves in Calcutta in 1895, Took a US Patent on a Crystal Detector in 1904, and Spent His Later Years Measuring How Fast Plants Grow

Jagadish Chandra Bose used radio waves a few millimetres to a few centimetres long to ring a bell and set off gunpowder from a distance in Calcutta in 1895. In 2012 the IEEE, the engineers’ professional body, gave the work a Milestone plaque at Presidency College and called it the first millimetre-wave communication system in the world. Whether that puts him ahead of Guglielmo Marconi is a separate question, and the historians who have studied it do not agree.

Bose was born on 30 November 1858 in Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh, and died on 23 November 1937, according to the Royal Society’s record. Between those dates he built radio apparatus in a converted corner of a government college, held a US patent on a crystal detector, designed instruments that magnified plant growth 10,000 times or more, and dedicated a research institute in Calcutta on his birthday in 1917.

A laboratory beside a bathroom

At Christ’s College, Cambridge, Bose had Lord Rayleigh among his lecturers and took his degree in 1884, DT Emerson of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory writes. A review of Subrata Dasgupta’s biography says his appointment as a professor of physics at Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1885 needed the personal intervention of the viceroy, Lord Ripon. Patrick Geddes, whose 1920 book is the earliest full biography, reports that an Indian professor then drew two thirds of a European’s pay, and that Bose’s temporary status cut it again to a third. He refused, Geddes says, to touch his monthly cheque for three years.

In 1894, after reading Oliver Lodge’s book on Heinrich Hertz and his successors, Bose turned a small enclosure beside a bathroom at the college into a laboratory, Emerson writes. Hertz, who first produced radio waves in 1888, had worked at 66 centimetres. Bose went down to 5 millimetres, and a physicist named Lebedev in Moscow was independently working at about 6 millimetres.

Short waves suited a small room, according to the IEEE’s Milestone page, because Bose could study how they behave like light without a large hall. He made his own spark transmitter, coherer (a receiver whose electrical resistance changes when waves reach it), dielectric lens, polarizer, horn antenna and diffraction grating. Among his polarizers, Emerson notes, was a copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable with tinfoil slipped between the pages.

What the 1895 demonstration showed

Bose transmitted and received waves of 60 GHz in 1895 over 23 metres, through two intervening walls, ringing a bell and detonating gunpowder, says the IEEE’s summary. Geddes, writing 25 years after the event, describes a public lecture in Calcutta. In his account the rays crossed 75 feet (about 23 metres), three solid walls and the body of the chairman, who happened to be the Lieutenant-Governor, and at the far end the receiver rang a bell, fired a pistol and exploded a miniature mine.

Two details differ between these accounts. Presidency College is the venue and two the number of walls in the IEEE’s version, whereas Geddes names no building and counts three. Emerson gives no date within 1895.

Geddes adds that Bose raised a metal plate on a 20-foot pole at each end, and planned a link between his house and Presidency College, a mile away, but left for England before he built it. A Daily Chronicle report of 1896, which Emerson quotes, says Bose had “transmitted signals to a distance of nearly a mile.” Geddes mentions only the plan.

Reviewing Bose’s papers in December 1895, The Electrician praised the “substantial and workmanlike” coherer he described, Geddes reports, and judged it more likely than earlier forms to survive the shocks of use at sea.

The Royal Institution lecture of January 1897

Lord Rayleigh invited Bose to report on his millimetre-wave work at the Royal Institution in London, which he did in January 1897 as a Friday Evening Discourse. According to the Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology review, no Indian had given one before. By 1898, the review adds, Bose had published 13 papers, and every one of the seven in the Royal Society’s Proceedings was communicated by Rayleigh.

Bose’s Collected Physical Papers reprint the lecture, which is about the optics of electric waves: reflection, refraction and polarisation. It does not discuss telegraphy. His whole apparatus, he told the audience, fitted in a case 60 centimetres long. On producing a response in a receiver at a distance, he said only that large, energetic waves serve best, and that precision experiments need different conditions. Near the end he raised the possibility that the Sun gives off radio waves, which Emerson notes was not confirmed until 1942, and he closed with a line about the East taking “her part” in science alongside the West.

The priority dispute with Marconi

Emerson concludes that “it appears” Bose’s demonstration of remote wireless signalling has priority over Marconi, whose first successful test on Salisbury Plain came in May 1897. Marconi goes unmentioned on the IEEE Milestone page.

Other historians put it differently. Dasgupta, as summarised in the review, holds that priority claims made on Bose’s behalf reflect “parochial passions rather than historical truths,” and that Bose contributed to the prehistory of radiotelegraphy as many others did. Oliver Lodge was demonstrating coherers in public in 1894, the Linda Hall Library notes, and Marconi, entering the business about a year later, got into a priority dispute with Lodge.

On the dates alone, Bose rang a bell by radio waves before Marconi’s first recorded test. Whether the 1895 demonstration counts as wireless telegraphy, and whether the printed 1897 lecture shows him aiming at it, is where the historians part.

The mercury detector and the 1904 patent

In the paper Bose read to the Royal Society in April 1899, on a self-recovering coherer, he describes a receiver that gave almost no reading on his galvanometer. Suspecting that it responded and recovered too fast to register, he put a telephone in the circuit. It sounded each time a flash of radiation fell on the receiver, “no tapping being necessary to restore the sensitiveness.” An ordinary coherer had to be tapped after every signal to reset it.

A carbon, mercury and iron detector of 1899 to 1901 known as the “Italian Navy coherer” sits in the Science Museum Group’s collection, described as a modified version of the type Bose invented in 1899. Its record says it may be the detector that received the “S” signals in Marconi’s transatlantic test in Newfoundland in December 1901, and adds that Marconi was reluctant to say exactly which apparatus he used.

PK Bondyopadhyay, a senior IEEE member, goes further in a 1998 paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE. He argues that the detector Marconi used on 12 December 1901 was Bose’s, and that it reached Marconi through Lieutenant Solari of the Italian Navy, a childhood friend of Marconi’s, who passed on a slightly modified version. Marconi told the Royal Institution on 13 June 1902, as Bondyopadhyay quotes him, that the coherer came from Italian Navy technical staff and was brought to him by Solari. Bondyopadhyay credits the British historian VJ Phillips with setting out the affair but not its origin. The museum’s wording is more cautious than his.

US patent 755,840, “Detector for Electrical Disturbances,” was filed by Bose on 30 September 1901 and granted on 29 March 1904. It assigns half the rights to Sara Chapman Bull of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its claims include a pair of galena (lead sulphide) contacts. Pearson and Brattain gave Bose priority in 1954 for using a semiconducting crystal to detect radio waves, Emerson says, and he quotes the Nobel laureate Nevill Mott: “J.C. Bose was at least 60 years ahead of his time.” The semiconductor plants India has approved in the 2020s are tracked in our report on the chip programme.

The patent that complicates the story

Bose resolved early to seek no personal gain from his inventions, Geddes says. In 1901, just before his Royal Institution lecture of that year, a leading maker of wireless apparatus offered him a paying agreement and he declined. An American friend then patented the invention in his name, “but Bose would not use his rights, and allowed the patent to lapse.”

Bose’s own account is a letter to Rabindranath Tagore dated 17 May 1901, which Bondyopadhyay and Banerjee reproduce in translation. A telegraph company’s proprietor had called on him with a patent form and said, in Bose’s words, “You do not know what money you are throwing away.” Bose wrote that he regarded his research as “above commercial profit or loss” and could not find enough time for his own work. Christ’s College, Cambridge, tells a similar story but places it at the 1897 lecture and attributes the offer to Marconi’s business partner. Bose’s letter names no one and gives 1901.

Bondyopadhyay and Banerjee argue that this was no refusal to patent at all. They found that Bose and Sara Bull filed five provisional applications for British patents from 9 May 1901, and that two became patents, numbers 15,467 and 18,430, alongside the US patent. In their reading the letter shows that Bose objected to restrictions on his lectures and publications. Bull, they report, had visited India in 1898 at the invitation of Swami Vivekananda, heard Bose lecture in Paris on 23 October 1900, and financed the applications.

From metals to plants

Around 1900 Bose’s attention moved from radio waves to living things. At the Royal Institution in May 1901 he spoke on how inorganic matter responds to mechanical and electrical stimulus. Fatigue of response in tin and inorganic matter “killed” by poisons appear among the contents of that paper in the Collected Physical Papers. A book of 1902, Response in the Living and Non-Living, followed, and by 1903, the Dasgupta review says, his attention had turned almost entirely to plants.

His best-known instrument is the crescograph, which records how fast a plant grows. In the high-magnification form, by Bose’s description, two levers each enlarge the movement a hundredfold, giving 10,000 times in total, and a clockwork-driven smoked glass plate takes the record. For finer work he built a magnetic version, which he said could magnify “as high as 50 million” times. At a demonstration setting of one million, he wrote, a lily bud growing at 0.0006 millimetre per second sent a spot of light across a three-metre scale in 5 seconds at 30 degrees Celsius. Cooling to 26 degrees stretched that to 20 seconds, and at 21 degrees growth stopped.

Royal Society referees were not unanimous about his plant work. Of the three reports on his 1917 crescograph paper, William Bayliss wrote that “The author does not seem to be familiar with other work on the subject and only references a textbook.” Vernon Blackman called the paper “diffuse” and found “a lack of knowledge of plant physiology,” and suggested a short paper for the Proceedings instead. Frederick Blackman recommended publication: “The research, although probably containing experimental errors, is valuable.” It appeared in the Proceedings in 1919.

Nature’s reviewer, signing as VHB on 3 June 1920, described Bose’s balanced crescograph, which Bose said could detect a change in growth rate of 1 part in 27,000, and wanted proof that its drive kept a steady speed for many hours. Blunter about the larger programme, the Dasgupta review says Bose’s conclusion that no clear barrier separates life from non-life rested on a “highly questionable assumption” that electrical activity alone is enough for life. His explanations went far beyond his data, it adds, although his skill at building delicate instruments won respect even from his critics.

The fellowship and the institute

The Royal Society records Bose’s election as a Fellow on 13 May 1920. He had retired from Presidency College in 1915 and been appointed Professor Emeritus, Emerson writes.

Bose dedicated the Bose Institute to the nation on 30 November 1917 in a speech titled “The voice of life.” Its own history says the lecture hall was modelled on the Royal Institution’s, that Sara Chapman Bull’s philanthropy was significant in setting it up, and that Rabindranath Tagore wrote its anthem. A generation later, in the same city, CV Raman saw the light-scattering lines that bear his name.

Some of the ideas in Bose’s 1897 papers, Emerson reports, have been built into a 1.3-millimetre multi-beam receiver now used on the NRAO 12 Meter Telescope.