Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose Is The Unsung Hero Of The Tech Behind Modern Day Wi-FI
If it weren't for this Bengali physicist, you wouldn't have half of the conveniences you do today.
We easily take for granted a lot of the technology around us that we use everyday, from the smartphones in our pockets to the laptops in our homes, to even our various appliances. Yet each of those devices is available to us because of the contributions of the scientific community.
Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose is one such Indian contributor, and we remember his incredible genius on his 159th birth anniversary.
A forgotten genius from the turn of the 20th century, Bose was renowned as a polymath, physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist and archaeologist. And at the very least, we can remember some of the Bengali icon¡¯s greatest accomplishments on his 159th birth anniversary today.
For one, Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose is considered to be the lesser-known father of modern WiFi. Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi is credited with first inventing the telegraph in 1895, but Bose was at the same time attempting to understand radio waves and their behaviour. He was the first to demonstrate radio communication with millimetre wavelengths, which fall in the 30GHz to 300GHz spectrum. Those millimetre waves now form the backbone of the coming 5G technology.
Additionally, his technology is also crucial to everything from radio telescopes to radar and, more recently, for collision-warning systems and cruise control in modern day cars.
However, Bose never expressed any interest in commercialising his research, instead encouraging other to use it as the basis of their own work. In fact, in 1896, he met Marconi, who had been trying to market his radio wave wireless telegraphy system to the British post service. Even Marconi actually acknowledged the significance of Bose¡¯s work in his writing.
Bose also held the patent for the first solid-state diode to receive electromagnetic waves, and created a number of now common microwave components. He also made significant contributions to plant biology inventing a crescograph, which helped agricultural scientists devise better ways of effective crop cultivation.
It¡¯s no surprise then that Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose is even recognised by Earth¡¯s space explorers, with a crater on the far side of the moon named after him.
