More than two centuries ago, if someone had claimed that plants have life, it would have been considered outrageous and triggered tittering in scientific circles. But Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose sowed the seeds of the hypothesis and later proved it through his profound research, allowing us to preserve greenery by considering them lung spaces. A year after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Bose was born on November 30 in Munshiganj, Bengal Presidency (now in Bangladesh).
His father, a civil servant, sent him to a Bengali-medium school as he believed his son should soak in the native language when the formative factors were at play. Bose, a close friend of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, looked back to those days at a conference in Bikrampur in 1915: “I listened spellbound to their (schoolmates’) stories of birds, animals, and aquatic creatures. Perhaps, these stories created a keen interest in investigating the workings of nature.”
Oblivious of his destiny, he wanted to be a civil servant like his father after passing out from the University of Calcutta in 1879 with a BA. Dissuaded by his father, Bose studied natural science in Christ’s College, Cambridge, and received a BA in 1884. Plants are ubiquitous, unresponsive, and almost inconspicuous in their movement.
For his investigation, which began in 1899, into the response of inorganic matter, he required special apparatus. To study heliotropic movement of plants (movement to a source of light), he invented a torsional recorder, with which he could record the ultramicroscopic movement of plants, and “the secret of plant life was thus for the first time revealed by the autographs of the plant itself”, Bose said in his inaugural address of the Bose Institute in then Calcutta in 1917.
The Los Angeles Examiner announced his work: Plants can feel, says Dr Bose, suffer sleep and get excited. He also invented the crescograph to instantly capture the growth of plants and their variations under different treatments, catapulting practical agriculture into the realm of modifying the growth rate rather than months of experiments and being uncertain if the results were vitiated by unknown changes.
A student of Lord Rayleigh, who explained why the sky is blue (Rayleigh scattering), at Cambridge, Bose created radio waves, as short as 5mm, better known as microwaves, conducting his research in a 20 sq ft room at Presidency College, Kolkata (now Presidency University). In 1895, he was the first to demonstrate the wireless transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves that had a frequency of 60Hz and travelled over 23m.