The Scientist Who Listened to Plants

In 1895, in the Town Hall of Calcutta, a crowd watched a slim Bengali professor stand beside a strange set of instruments.

At one end of the room was a small machine that made a spark. Some distance away, with a wall and people in between, was a bell, and a small charge of gunpowder. The professor switched on his machine. Nothing visible crossed the room. And yet, on the far side, the bell rang and the gunpowder went off with a puff of smoke.

The man was Jagadish Chandra Bose. He had sent invisible electric waves through solid walls and made them do work at the other end. It was one of the earliest demonstrations of its kind anywhere in the world.

The village school

Jagadish was born on 30 November 1858 in Mymensingh, in Bengal, in what is now Bangladesh. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was a government officer, and could have sent his son to an English-medium school, as most officials did.

Instead he sent him to the village school, where lessons were in Bengali. Jagadish sat beside the sons of farmers and fishermen. They told him stories of animals, birds and river creatures, and he grew up with a deep love of the natural world. His father believed a child should first know his own language and his own people.

Later Jagadish studied at St Xavier's College in Calcutta, and then went to England. He first meant to study medicine, but fell ill, and changed course to the natural sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge.

Unequal pay

In 1885 he returned to India and became a professor of physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. He soon found that, as an Indian, he was offered much less pay than the European professors doing the same work.

He refused to accept the lower salary. For about three years he taught without taking his pay at all, though it meant real hardship for his family. In the end the college gave in, made his post permanent and paid him in full for the years he had worked.

The college gave him no proper laboratory. He built his own instruments in a small room, with the help of a local tinsmith, and did his research in the evenings after teaching.

Invisible waves

Bose became fascinated by the waves that the German scientist Heinrich Hertz had discovered: electric waves that travel through space like light, but cannot be seen. Bose made them much shorter than anyone had before, the kind we now call microwaves, and designed clever new detectors to catch them.

This was the science that would later make radio, radar and mobile phones possible. Bose lectured on his results in London and Europe and was widely admired.

But he was not interested in making money from it. He believed that scientific knowledge should belong to everyone. He was very reluctant to take out patents, and only agreed once, in the United States in 1904, after friends pressed him. Others went on to build businesses on radio. Bose turned to a different question.

Do plants feel?

He had noticed that his metal detectors seemed to get "tired" after long use and to recover after a rest, a little like living muscle. That made him wonder. If metals responded like this, how did plants respond?

He spent the rest of his working life trying to find out. He built extremely sensitive instruments. The most famous, the crescograph, could magnify a plant's growth thousands of times, so that the movement of a growing tip, too slow for the eye, could be seen and recorded.

He showed that plants respond to touch, heat, light, injury and poisons with tiny electrical signals, in some ways like the signals in animal nerves. Some scientists of his time were doubtful, and not all of his ideas have been accepted. But today, scientists do study how plants use electrical signals, and Bose is remembered as a pioneer.

The temple of science

On his birthday in 1917, Bose opened the Bose Institute in Calcutta, a research centre he described as a temple of science, open to discovery for India and the world. He was knighted that same year, and in 1920 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in London.

He was also a close friend of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, and he wrote one of the earliest science fiction stories in Bengali.

Jagadish Chandra Bose died on 23 November 1937, a week before his seventy-ninth birthday. The institute he founded still works today. In 2012, the world's leading engineering society placed a plaque in Kolkata honouring his early work on microwaves.

Want to read more?

Patrick Geddes's The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose, written while Bose was alive, describes his experiments in detail. Subrata Dasgupta's Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science places him in the history of Indian science.