The debates

Did Marconi use Bose’s detector?

Bose described a mercury coherer with a telephone to the Royal Society in 1899. Lieutenant Luigi Solari of the Italian Navy passed a modified version to Marconi. Marconi filed a British patent in September 1901 without naming Bose. P. K. Bondyopadhyay argued in 1998 that this device received the first transatlantic signal on 12 December 1901. The Science Museum Group says Italian experimenters made unimportant changes and were reluctant to name the true inventor.

Bose made no claim against Marconi. He had shown the coherer openly in 1897 and praised Marconi in an interview that year. He said the invention mattered more than the inventor. The Science Museum notes that Marconi himself suggested several coherers may have been used and that the detector’s identity emerged only slowly. Marconi’s patent was later amended to credit Solari.

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) · Science Museum Group: ‘Italian Navy’ detector, 1899–1901 · British Library: Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, the man who almost invented the radio · ThePrint: J.C. Bose, the father of radio science forgotten by the West due to his aversion to patents (30 November 2020)

Did Bose invent radio?

Popular accounts call him the father of radio science. Kunal Ghosh argues he deserved Marconi’s 1909 Nobel Prize. In 1903 Sister Nivedita wrote to Tagore that Bose had anticipated Marconi by two years.

Historians are more cautious. Kapil Subramanian notes that Oliver Lodge showed wireless signalling in 1894 before Bose did. Subrata Dasgupta calls the Marconi claim the core of a “Boseian myth”. Bondyopadhyay reports that Bose said he had no interest in telegraphy. The IEEE honours him for the first millimetre-wave communication experiments and not for radio as a whole.

ThePrint: J.C. Bose, the father of radio science forgotten by the West due to his aversion to patents (30 November 2020) · Aleph Book Company: Unsung Genius, A Life of 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) · 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) · IEEE Milestone: First Millimeter-wave Communication Experiments by J.C. Bose, 1894–96 (dedicated September 2012)

Do plants feel?

He described an apparent power of feeling in plants. He read his results as challenging Darwin and sometimes indulged spiritualist readings. John Burdon-Sanderson reviewed his Mimosa paper harshly. Augustus Waller disputed his priority in Nature in 1902. In 2007 a large group of plant scientists wrote that there is no evidence for neurons, synapses or a brain in plants.

His core claim has largely held. V. A. Shepherd shows that electrical signalling through the phloem was accepted by the 1990s and that modern action-potential speeds overlap his Mimosa figures. Calvo, Sahi and Trewavas call him the father of plant electrophysiology but stay agnostic on sentience. Bose himself pressed his priority over Waller in print. No direct reply by him on the word feeling was found.

Britannica: Sir 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) · Science and Culture: V. A. Shepherd, At the roots of plant neurobiology, a brief history of the biophysical research of J. C. Bose (2012) · Nature: Augustus D. Waller, Re vegetable electricity (18 September 1902) · Trends in Plant Science: Alpi et al., Plant neurobiology: no brain, no gain? (2007) · Plant, Cell & Environment: Calvo, Sahi and Trewavas, Are plants sentient? (2017)

Was he wrong about the ascent of sap?

In 1923 he argued that living cells pump sap upward in pulses. He doubted that water columns in the xylem could hold tension. Most plant physiologists accept the tension-cohesion theory of Dixon and Joly from 1894. On that view living cells are not involved.

Shepherd notes the question is not fully closed. Peristaltic and gas-bubble models remain partial alternatives. The pulsing motif he proposed resembles modern models of the osmotic motor in leaf movement.

Wikipedia: Jagadish Chandra Bose · Science and Culture: V. A. Shepherd, At the roots of plant neurobiology, a brief history of the biophysical research of J. C. Bose (2012)

Did Sister Nivedita get her due?

Sister Nivedita became his editorial assistant in 1898. She helped him write papers and books. He never acknowledged her help in print. The researcher Siladitya Jana found that a line in which Bose told her to leave the ideas to him was cut from translations of her biography.

Kunal Ghosh calls her Bose’s scientific soulmate and argues her Vedantic ideas shaped his plant work. The Tribune’s reviewer finds his evidence for that thin. No direct reply by Bose on the question of credit was found.

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) · The Tribune: Re-inventing JC Bose, review of Unsung Genius (17 July 2022)

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