“What happens if you take a rich magistrate’s son and make him learn in a village school sitting besides the sons of servants and fishermen? He’ll hear tales of birds and animals that make him curious about Nature. And that makes him one of India’s first scientists.” – Jagdish Chandra Bose
In 1914, a journalist for The Nation wrote about an experiment he witnessed in a small private laboratory in Maida Vale in London:
“An unfortunate creature is strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. When the subject is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very delicate lever that actuates a tiny mirror. This casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus enormously exaggerates the tremor of the creature. A pinch near the right-hand tube sends the beam 7 or 8 feet to the right, and a stab near the other wire sends it as far to the left.
“Thus,” the journalist concluded, “can science reveal the feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot.”
The carrot vivisector mentioned above was Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, a scientist widely acknowledges as the father of modern Indian science. However to call Bose just a scientist would, however, be akin to calling Leonardo Da Vinci a mere painter.
A man whose genius transcended boundaries, Bose was a quintessential polymath: a physicist, a biologist, a botanist, an archaeologist, an author, and a connoisseur of fine arts.
However, like most pioneering scientists, Bose was famed for his more controversial pursuits – his experiments in plant physiology during the 1900s that drew some startling inferences. On his 158th birth anniversary, we bring you the story of J C Bose’s path-breaking work on the discovery of plant stimuli.
He also developed an improved ‘coherer’ (a device that detects radio waves) – the first to use a semiconductor junction – but was unwilling to patent it. Bose believed that science should be for the benefit of humankind and one should not make money from it. However, under pressure from his friends, he finally submitted a patent application to the US patent office and on March 29, 1904, he became the first Indian to get a US patent for his “detector of electrical disturbances”. Interestingly, Bose’s coherer was the one used by Guglielmo Marconi to build an operational two-way radio.
Read More at https://www.thebetterindia.com/76587/jagdish-chandra-bose-indian-biophysicist-radio-plant-physiology/
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