Jagadis Chandra Bose

Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937) was a physicist and plant physiologist, born in Bengal and schooled in Calcutta before he read for the Natural Sciences Tripos at Christ's College, Cambridge, and took a London BSc. In the 1890s he built and demonstrated apparatus that generated electric waves only a few millimetres long, work that fed into early wireless engineering, then turned to the electrical responses of plants and metals and devised the crescograph to record minute growth. Knighted in 1917, he opened the Bose Institute in Calcutta the same year and paid for it with the savings of a lifetime. He also wrote one of the earliest works of Bengali science fiction.