- Lived:
- 30 November 1858, Mymensingh, East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) → Calcutta (Kolkata), with the decisive years in a tiny room at Presidency College; died 23 November 1937 at Giridih
- Field:
- physics — the world's first millimetre-wave radio experiments — and then plant physiology, pursued with instruments he built himself
- The Big Idea:
- In 1895, in a small Calcutta room, Bose generated and detected radio waves at frequencies the world would not use again for half a century, demonstrated them in public before Marconi filed his first patent — and refused, on principle, to patent any of it. Then he spent thirty years building instruments sensitive enough to show that plants respond to the world electrically, like slow, silent animals.
- In their words:
- "…not merely a laboratory, but a temple." (dedicating the Bose Institute, 30 November 1917)
- If you remember one thing:
- The first great experimental scientist of modern India worked in a 24-square-foot room on one-third pay he refused to draw, gave his inventions away to the world, and was proved right twice — once within two years, once within a century.