The
plaques are being put up as part of the ‘Milestones in Electrical
Engineering and Computing’ of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a professional body with members from 160
countries. It established the Milestones programme in 1983 to recognise
“technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.”
Guglielmo
Marconi is often credited with inventing radio transmission and shared
the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ferdinand Braun for ‘development of
wireless telegraphy.’
First to do
“But the
record clearly shows that wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves
was first successfully demonstrated by Bose and that too in Calcutta
[now Kolkata], not London or elsewhere” remarked Ranjit Nair, director
of the Delhi-based Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science.
Dr.
Nair had helped organise a symposium in 2008 to mark the great
scientist’s 150 birth anniversary at his alma mater, Christ’s College at
Cambridge in the U.K.
The first demonstration by
Bose, using apparatus he had designed and built, took place in 1895 at
Presidency College (now Presidency University) where he taught,
according to Sibaji Raha, director of the Bose Institute in Kolkata. The
transmitter, which generated the wireless signal was put in a
colleague’s room while the detector was in an adjoining room with the
principal of the college, Sir Alexander Pedler, himself a chemist of
some renown, present. The wireless signal went through a closed door,
rang a bell and set off some gunpowder.
Public demonstration
Soon
thereafter, Bose held a public demonstration at the Town Hall in the
presence of the Lt. Governor of Bengal, said Dr Raha in an email.
In
1897, Bose reported on his experiments at the Royal Institution in
London. Marconi, who had moved from Italy to England by that time, was
not getting the desired result with his efforts at transmission.
But
soon after Bose’s talk, Marconi changed the design of his detector to
one that was “uncannily similar” to the one the former had designed and
successfully demonstrated. Later that year, Marconi carried out his
first successful demonstration of wireless signalling, Dr. Raha pointed
out.
Moreover, Bose made use of galena crystals in
his detectors, presaging work in semi-conductors that revolutionised
electronics many decades later.
The plaque for Bose
will be at Presidency University. The one for Raman is being placed at
the current premises of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of
Science (its original building, where he carried out his experimental
work for many years, is now a college of commerce).
When
light is scattered by an atom or molecule, it can gain or lose energy
in the process, leading to a change in colour of the light that bounces
off. Raman found that this colour change was related to the properties
of the material that caused the scattering.
The
‘Raman Effect,’ for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1930, has become an
invaluable analytical tool in a wide range of fields, from industrial
chemistry to life sciences and forensic investigations, for establishing
the chemical composition and molecular structure of materials.
Raman
scattering is now entering the realm of fibre optic communications that
are the backbone of the digital world of today. Fibre optic cables that
girdle the globe move zillions of bits every second to every part of
this planet.
“There is still an ever-increasing
demand for bandwidth due to an explosive increase in the volume of
internet data, voice and video to be transferred,” said Deepa Venkitesh
of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of
Technology Madras. “Amplifiers based on the ‘Raman Effect’ are becoming
the preferred choice to meet this demand.”
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