Jagadish Chandra Bose

Jagadish Chandra Bose was an Indian physicist and plant physiologist who carried out pioneering research into radio waves and later into the physiology of plants. In the 1890s Bose conducted early experiments generating, transmitting and detecting millimeter-wavelength radio waves, developing sensitive semiconductor detectors including a mercury coherer that was later adopted by Guglielmo Marconi's own transatlantic radio work, research now recognized as some of the earliest practical demonstrations of wireless signal detection and an early foundation of solid-state electronics. Bose later turned to plant physiology, inventing the crescograph, a sensitive mechanical instrument using clockwork gears and a smoked glass recording plate that could measure plant growth and movement in increments as small as one hundred-thousandth of an inch, and used it to study how plants respond to stimuli such as light, fertilizers and mechanical or electrical shocks. Through this work Bose argued that plant tissue shows measurable, quasi-nervous responses to stimuli comparable in some respects to animal tissue, a claim that was controversial among some contemporaries but drew wide attention to the previously understudied dynamic physiology of plants. Bose founded the Bose Institute in Calcutta in 1917 as a center for interdisciplinary scientific research and in 1920 became the first Indian physicist elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.