research

Jagadish Chandra Bose

About: 

Jagadis Chandra Bose was a Bengali scientist: a biologist, a physicist, a botanist and a writer of science fiction. He is considered the father of radio science as he was the first person in the world to demonstrate wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves after returning to India in 1885 (although he did not patent this invention, which was brought out by Marconi two years later). Bose then demonstrated how plants responded to various stimuli, demonstrating the electrical nature of this conduction. He is considered a pioneer in the field of biophysics.

Bose went to England in 1880 for his further education. Initially he had plans to compete for the ICS, and then to study medicine, but enrolled in the Natural Sciences tripos at Christ's College, Cambridge. He received his BA in 1884 and then obtained a DSc from the University of London. He later received an honorary degree from Aberdeen University.

Bose returned to India in 1885 with a position at Presidency College, Calcutta. He returned to Britain and Europe a number of times to lecture. For example in 1914, he lectured at Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal Institution. During this visit he had a private laboratory in Maida Vale, London, where various European scientists would visit Bose. He was founder and Director of the Bose Research Institute, Calcutta, in 1917. He was knighted in 1917, and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920 (the first Indian to become a fellow for science as opposed to mathematics).

Published works: 

Response in the Living and Non-Living (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1902)

Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906)

Researches in Irritability of Plants (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1913)

Plant Autographs & Their Revelations (Washington, 1915)

The Physiology of the Ascent of Sap (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923)

The Physiology of Photosynthesis (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924)

The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926)

Motor Mechanisms of Plants (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928)

Growth and Tropic Movements of Plants (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929)

Date of birth: 
30 Nov 1858
Connections: 

Francis Balfour, Ananda Mohun Bose, Francis Darwin, Patrick Geddes, Prafulla Chandra Ray, Boshi Sen, John Strutt (Lord Rayleigh).

Reviews: 

Obituary, The Times, 24 November 1937

Secondary works: 

Geddes, Patrick, The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920)

Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose: His Life and Speeches (Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1920)

City of birth: 
Mymensingh, Bengal
Country of birth: 
India
Current name country of birth: 
Bangladesh
Other names: 

Jagadis Chandra Bose

Jagadis Chunder Bose

Location

Christ's College, Cambridge, CB2 3AR
United Kingdom
52° 12' 11.2068" N, 0° 7' 26.9436" E
Date of death: 
23 Nov 1937
Location of death: 
Bengal, India
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1880
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1880-5 (education); 1896-7; 1900-2; 1907; 1914-15.

Tags for Making Britain: 

P. C. Ray

About: 

P. C. Ray was a chemist, a historian and sociologist of science and an industrial entrepreneur. Following education in Calcutta, he won a Gilchrist Scholarship to study in Britain in the 1880s. He was met in London by Jagadish Chandra Bose and Satyaranjan Das. A week later he went up to Edinburgh University, with letters of introduction to Edinburgh families provided by Elizabeth Manning.

Ray studied chemistry, physics and zoology for a BSc and was then awarded a DSc in inorganic chemistry in 1887. He was elected Vice-President of the University Chemical Society in 1887. Ray wished to apply for a position within the Indian Educational Service although the higher posts in education were all but closed off to Indians. He returned to India in 1888, and armed with various letters of recommendation tried to enter the service. He was unemployed for a year until he got a temporary teaching post in Calcutta.

P. C. Ray eventually set up the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works in Calcutta, India's first pharmaceutical company. In 1904 he toured Europe and was given a warm reception by Indian students at Edinburgh. In 1912, the University of Durham conferred unto him an honorary DSc degree. Ray was awarded with the Companionship of the Indian Empire (CIE) in 1912 and a knighthood in 1919. In 1916 he took up a position at the University College of Science in Calcutta, where he remained until retirement.

Published works: 

Antiquity of Hindu Chemistry (Calcutta, 1918)

Autobiography of a Bengali Chemist (Calcutta: Orient Book Company, 1958)

Essays and Discourses (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1918)

History of Hindu Chemistry from the Earliest Times to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century A. D., 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1902-9)

Makers of Modern Chemistry (Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee, 1925)

Pursuit of Chemistry in Bengal: A Lecture (Calcutta: B. M. Gupta, 1916)

Date of birth: 
02 Aug 1861
Secondary works: 

Lourdusamy, J., Science and National Consciousness in Bengal 1870-1930 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004)

Archive source: 

P. C. Ray Museum, University College of Science, Calcutta

City of birth: 
Raruli, Bengal
Country of birth: 
India
Current name city of birth: 
Raruli
Current name country of birth: 
Bangladesh
Other names: 

Prafulla Chandra Ray

Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray

Location

University of Edinburgh EH8 9YL
United Kingdom
55° 57' 7.956" N, 3° 10' 19.4196" W
Date of death: 
16 Jun 1944
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1882
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1882-8, 1904, 1920, 1926

Location: 

Edinburgh University

Tags for Making Britain: 

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

About: 

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was an applied mathematician and astrophysicist. He completed his university education at Presidency College, Madras graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics. In June 1930, he moved to Britain for graduate studies. He was awarded a Government of India scholarship to study at Cambridge as a member of Trinity College where he became a research student under the supervision of Professor R. H. Fowler. He took his PhD degree at Cambridge in the summer of 1933. In October 1933 he was awarded a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College for the period 1933-7. He joined the Faculty of the University of Chicago in 1937 and remained there for the rest of his academic career.

He made one of his most significant discoveries while on his way to England, called ‘Chandrasekhar's limit’. He applied Einstein’s theory of relativity to the processes inside a star. His calculations suggested that once a star had burned up all its energy it would collapse to a point of infinite density, until it would disappear in what would be later described as a black hole. On arrival, however, his colleagues paid little attention to his discovery. Eddington took great interest in Chandrasekhar’s work, and it looked as though he approved of his work. He persuaded Chandrasekhar to present his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society in London on 11 January 1935. The day before the event, he found out that Eddington would give the following lecture on the same topic. Eddington used the opportunity to demolish the young researcher’s calculations and theory, dismissing it as mere mathematical game playing. However, while Chandrasekhar’s work was based on sound mathematical calculations, Eddington’s argument was in this case unfounded.

It would take years before scientists would follow up Chandrasekhar’s calculations and the controversy would preoccupy scientific journals for several years. In 1966 scientists combined computer codes for astrophysics and the hydrogen bomb and proved that a star could collapse and fall into a black hole. In 1972 the first black hole was positively identified. Chandrasekhar's outstanding contribution to astrophysics was acknowledged with the 1983 Nobel prize for physics for his work on white dwarfs and black holes and in 1984 by the Royal Society's Copley medal.

Published works: 

An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939)

Principles of Stellar Dynamics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942)

The Illumination and Polarization of the Sunlit Sky on Rayleigh Scattering (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1954)

Radiative Transfer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950)

Plasma Physics (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1960)

Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stablility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961)

Plasma Physics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975) [1960]

Ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1969)

Liquid Crystals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)

The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)

Eddington: The Most Distinguished Astrophysicist of his Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

Selected papers (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1989)

Relativistic Astrophysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)

Newton's Principial for the Common Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) [1983]

Date of birth: 
19 Oct 1910
Connections: 

Professor P. A. M. Dirac, Arthur Stanley Eddington, R. H. Fowler, E. A. Milne.

Royal Astronomical Society London

Secondary works: 

Mestel, Leon, ‘Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (1910–1995)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57771]

Miller, Arthur I., Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes (London: Little Brown, 2005)

Odelberg, Wilhelm (ed.), The Nobel Prizes 1983 (Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 1984)

Srinivasan, G. (ed.), From White Dwarfs to Black Holes: The Legacy of S. Chandrasekhar (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Venkataraman, G., Chandrasekhar and his Limit (Sangam, 1992)

Wali, Kameshwar C., Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)

Wali, Kameshwar C. (ed.), Chandrasekhar: The Man Behind the Legend - Chandra Remembered (London: Imperial College Press, 1997)

Wignesan, T. (ed.), The Man who Dwarfed the Stars (Asianists' Asia, 2004)

City of birth: 
Lahore
Country of birth: 
India
Current name city of birth: 
Lahore
Current name country of birth: 
Pakistan

Location

Trintiy College Cambridge, CB2 1TQ
United Kingdom
52° 10' 21.3528" N, 0° 6' 40.3992" E
Date of death: 
21 Aug 1995
Location of death: 
Chicago
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jun 1930
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1930-7

Tags for Making Britain: 
Subscribe to RSS - research