Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Rabindranath and Jagadish Chandra Bose




(From top left) C.V.Raman, Meghnad Saha, Homi Bhaba, J.C.Bose, Srinivasa, Ramanujan, S.Chandra Sekhar, Hargobind Khorana, S.N.Bose, Jayanta Narlikar, E.c.George Sudarshan. Bose and Patents: Bose was not interested in patenting his invention. In his friday evening Discourse at the Royal Institution, London, he made public his construction of the coherer. Thus the electric engineer expressed "surprise that no secret was at anytime made as to its construction, so that it has been open to all the world to adopt it for practical and possibly money making purposes."  Bose declined an offer from a wireless apparatus manufacturer for signing a remunerative agreement. One of Bose's American friends, Sara Chapman Bull, succeeded in persuading him to file a patent application on 30 September 1901 and it was granted as US patent 755840 on 29 march 1904.
Speaking in NewDelhi in August 2006, at a seminar titled Owning the Future:Ideas and The Role in the Digital age, Dr. V.S.Ramamurthy, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIT, Delhi, stressed the attitude of Bose towards patents: "His reluctance to any form of patenting is well known. It was contained in his letter to (Indian Nobel Laureate) Rabindranath Tagore dated 17 May 1901 from London. It was not that Sir Jagadish Chandra was unaware of patents and its advantages. He was the first Indian to get a US Patent ( No:755840) in 1904. And Sir Jagadish was not alone in his avowed reluctance to patenting. Roentgen, Pierre, Curie and others also chose the path of no patenting on moral grounds."  Bose also recorded his attitude towards patents in his inaugural lecture at the foundation of the Bose Institute on 30 November 1917.