Talk to Jagadish Chandra Bose
The physicist who argued plants respond like living nerves
1858–1937Bangladesh (Mymensingh) / India (Bengal)
A physicist and plant physiologist, and one of the first modern scientists from India to gain an international reputation. In the 1890s, at Presidency College, Calcutta, he generated and detected millimetre-wavelength radio waves and built sensitive detectors, including an early semiconductor (galena) detector. He later turned to the responses of plants, built instruments such as the crescograph, founded the Bose Institute in 1917, and wrote one of the earliest Bengali science-fiction stories.
Talk to J. C. Bose out loud in the Yuga app.
Questions to ask
- Did you really invent radio before Marconi?
- Do plants have feelings?
- What is a crescograph and how does it work?
- Why didn't you want to patent your inventions?
- What was your friendship with Tagore like?
Which J. C. Bose picks up
- 1901London and Calcutta. Aged 42, presenting his claims that metals and plants show electrical 'responses' like animal tissue, and facing hostility from some British physiologists.
- 1895Calcutta. Aged 36, demonstrating in public that his short electric waves can pass through walls and trigger a distant apparatus.
- 1897Royal Institution, London. Aged 38, giving a Friday Evening Discourse on his electric-wave research.
- 1917Calcutta. Aged 58, newly knighted, opening the Bose Institute on his birthday as a temple of science.
Questions about J. C. Bose
- Who was Jagadish Chandra Bose?
- A physicist and plant physiologist, and one of the first modern scientists from India to gain an international reputation. In the 1890s, at Presidency College, Calcutta, he generated and detected millimetre-wavelength radio waves and built sensitive detectors, including an early semiconductor (galena) detector. He later turned to the responses of plants, built instruments such as the crescograph, founded the Bose Institute in 1917, and wrote one of the earliest Bengali science-fiction stories.
- Can you talk to J. C. Bose with AI?
- Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of J. C. Bose, set in London and Calcutta, 1901. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.
- Is that really J. C. Bose's voice?
- No. No recording of their voice survives. Yuga's voice is designed from how people at the time described it, and every call is labelled an AI recreation.
- What did J. C. Bose say about Electric waves?
- Short electric waves behave like light: they can be reflected, refracted and polarised, and simple sensitive receivers can detect them. Source: 'On the Electric Waves', Friday Evening Discourse, Royal Institution, 1897; papers in Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1895–97.
- What did J. C. Bose say about Response of living and non-living matter?
- Metals, plants and animal tissue show similar fatigue, stimulation and depression of electrical response, which suggests a continuity between the living and the non-living. Source: Response in the Living and Non-Living, 1902.
- What did J. C. Bose say about Plant nerves and growth?
- Plants have excitable tissues and transmit impulses in a way analogous to nerves, and their growth responses can be measured with extreme magnification. Source: Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation, 1906; The Nervous Mechanism of Plants, 1926.
How J. C. Bose talks
He combines Victorian scientific English with Indian philosophical reflection. He likes demonstrations ('let me show you') and speaks of 'unity' between living and non-living matter. He is dignified, a little stern, and proud of doing science with Indian-made instruments.