AMAR BOSE The engineer who changed the way the world listens to music
MOTIHARI (BIHAR): During a quantum
physics class at Oxford, my tutor, an eminent nuclear physicist, remarked,
“What a brilliant person this Indian man was — Bose. He discovered the laws of
quantum statistics, invented the best speakers in the world, and gathered an
army from South East Asia to fight against the British.” A common error among
people in the West, this, not knowing that Bose is one of the most common
surnames in Bengal.
Of the three Boses in this
statement, while Subhas and Satyen Bose were born and bred in India, the most
famous of the Boses, whose name adorns speakers and radios in cars, at
restaurants and on mantelpieces all over the world, was born in Philadelphia in
1929.
Amar Bose’s father, Nani Gopal Bose,
a Physics student at Calcutta University and a freedom fighter, had fled the
country to avoid judicial custody. He settled in Philadelphia and married a
local schoolteacher. Amar Bose recalled there were few south Asian immigrants
in the US at that time, so they would be assumed to be AfroCaribbean in origin.
White kids chanted “Nigger, nigger” as he walked to school with his head hung
low.
Arriving in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, as an undergraduate at MIT changed his life forever. As a kid,
Amar Bose had discovered that he could fix radios at ease, and electronics came
naturally to him. After his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, he had
spent a year working on audio equipment at Philips Electronics in the
Netherlands,. However, he felt that his career lay in research, and he had
returned to MIT.
Following his PhD, and a few months
in India as a Fulbright scholar, Bose joined the faculty at MIT. It was only
when he had a teacher’s salary could he afford the high-end acoustic speakers
that he had coveted. What followed is a story I’ve heard him relate in several
talks. He felt the hi-fi sets he had bought were not satisfying, so he took
them apart in his MIT labs and started to modify them. Thus started his
lifelong work on advanced acoustic system.
When Bose founded his company in
1964, he made sure that all of the earnings of the company went back into
research. In 2011, Bose donated his entire stock in Bose Corporation to MIT,
under the condition that MIT could not sell its Bose shares, and Bose
Corporation would remain private independent.
When I was a research fellow at
Harvard in the early 1990s, I was amazed to find that a professor and
entrepreneur of his status still taught freshman classes at the MIT. I would
often make the short trip across Cambridge from Harvard to MIT, to sit at the
back of classes on introductory circuit theory.
A lingering memory, for me, will
always be the charming talk Bose gave at the 1994 celebration of the centenary
of the birth of his mentor and PhD adviser, the polymath Norbert Wiener. Wiener
believed in nurturing the whole personality of his students, and, he had wanted
Bose to learn more about the culture of his father’s country. In 1956, Wiener
arranged with his friend and collaborator, Prashanta Chandra Mahalanobis, that
Bose would take his Fulbright Fellowship to India.
Bose was quite daunted at this
prospect, as he didn’t speak Bengali, and had never been to India. That Wiener
and Mahalanobis had plans for him, was slowly revealed, when women students
began appearing at his hostel residence on most evenings, asking to take him
out. He found out later that Mahalanobis had to give Wiener detailed reports on
his “progress”.
It is thus not surprising that
later, on this trip to India, Bose met his future wife, Prema, with whom he had
two children, Maya and Vanu.
Bose passed away on Saturday 13th
July, at 83, having shown the world how forefront academic research can
spawn a global corporation, and how science can directly change our lives.
- Somak Raychaudhury 130714
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