Books and writing

On the Polarisation of Electric Rays by Double-Refracting Crystals: Paper, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1895)

Asiatic Society of Bengal. His first paper. Submitted in May 1895, it reported how crystals polarise short electric waves. Papers in The Electrician and to the Royal Society followed that year. Subrata Dasgupta counts his 1895 papers as the first scientific papers by an Indian.

Wikipedia: Jagadish Chandra Bose · Scroll: Why JC Bose is feted in India although he was mostly a marginal scientific figure in his lifetime, by Kapil Subramanian (23 November 2017)

Paper on the iron-mercury-iron coherer with a telephone: Paper, Proceedings of the Royal Society (1899)

The Royal Society. Communicated in March and read on 27 April 1899. It described a self-recovering detector heard through a telephone. He reported that the telephone sounded each time radiation reached the receiver. Bondyopadhyay argues in Proceedings of the IEEE that a modified version received Marconi’s transatlantic signal in 1901.

Proceedings of the IEEE: P. K. Bondyopadhyay, Sir J. C. Bose diode detector received Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless signal of December 1901 (January 1998) · Wikipedia: Jagadish Chandra Bose

Detector for Electrical Disturbances: US Patent 755,840 (1904)

United States Patent Office. A detector for electrical waves that used a contact with a crystal. Friends persuaded him to file it. He did not pursue it and let it lapse. Bondyopadhyay calls it the world’s first patent on a solid-state diode detector.

Wikipedia: Jagadish Chandra Bose · Bose Institute: Founder · Proceedings of the IEEE: P. K. Bondyopadhyay, Sir J. C. Bose diode detector received Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless signal of December 1901 (January 1998)

Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902)

Longmans, Green. His case that metals, plants and animal tissue respond to stimulus in the same way. It grew out of his 1900 Paris paper and his 1901 Royal Institution discourse. Augustus Waller disputed his priority in Nature. Kapil Subramanian notes that much of his key work of this decade appeared outside scientific journals.

Project Gutenberg: Response in the Living and Non-Living (Longmans, Green, 1902) · Nature: Augustus D. Waller, Re vegetable electricity (18 September 1902) · Scroll: Why JC Bose is feted in India although he was mostly a marginal scientific figure in his lifetime, by Kapil Subramanian (23 November 2017)

Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation (1906)

Longmans, Green. His first full book on plant physiology. It used electrical and mechanical records to study how plants react to stimuli.

Wikipedia: Jagadish Chandra Bose

Life Movements in Plants: Two volumes (1918)

Bose Research Institute, Calcutta. Reports from the new institute on plant movement and growth. Volume one appeared in 1918 and volume two in 1919.

Wikipedia: Jagadish Chandra Bose · Project Gutenberg: Life Movements in Plants, Volume II

The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926)

Longmans, Green. His argument that plants have a conducting system that works like nerves. He dedicated it to Rabindranath Tagore. Calvo, Sahi and Trewavas cite it in 2017 and call him the father of plant electrophysiology.

Bose Institute: Founder · Britannica: Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose · Plant, Cell & Environment: Calvo, Sahi and Trewavas, Are plants sentient? (2017)

Abyakta: Bengali essays (1921)

Calcutta (Bengali). A collection of his Bengali essays. It includes Palatak Toofan, his rewritten 1896 story of a storm calmed by hair oil. Strange Horizons published an English translation as Runaway Cyclone in 2013.

Strange Horizons: Introduction to Runaway Cyclone (30 September 2013) · Wikipedia: Jagadish Chandra Bose

The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose: By Patrick Geddes (a book about him) (1920)

Longmans, Green. Not written by Bose. The first biography, by the Scottish planner Patrick Geddes. It records his wish for no personal advantage from his inventions. A 2022 Tribune review calls it a hagiography.

National Library of Ireland: The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose, by Patrick Geddes (1920) · British Library: Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, the man who almost invented the radio · The Tribune: Re-inventing JC Bose, review of Unsung Genius (17 July 2022)

Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science: By Subrata Dasgupta (a book about him) (1999)

Oxford University Press. Not written by Bose. A scholarly study of his science and its place in colonial India. It traces the claim that he anticipated Marconi. Kapil Subramanian draws on it for Dasgupta’s term the “Boseian myth”.

Blackwell’s: Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science, by Subrata Dasgupta (Oxford University Press) · Scroll: Why JC Bose is feted in India although he was mostly a marginal scientific figure in his lifetime, by Kapil Subramanian (23 November 2017)

Unsung Genius: A Life of Jagadish Chandra Bose, by Kunal Ghosh (a book about him) (2022)

Aleph Book Company. Not written by Bose. A life by a retired IIT Kanpur aerospace professor. It argues Bose and not Marconi deserved the 1909 Nobel Prize. The Tribune’s reviewer says it raises more questions than it answers and leans on secondary sources.

Aleph Book Company: Unsung Genius, A Life of Jagadish Chandra Bose · Marcellus: Jagadish Chandra Bose, an excerpt from Unsung Genius (17 July 2022) · The Tribune: Re-inventing JC Bose, review of Unsung Genius (17 July 2022)

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