1) His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali freedom fighter who was studying physics at Calcutta University when he was arrested and imprisoned for his opposition to British rule in India. He escaped and fled to the United States in 1920, where he married an American schoolteacher.
2) At age 13, Dr. Bose began repairing radio sets for pocket money for repair shops in Philadelphia. During World War II, when his father’s import business struggled, Dr. Bose’s electronics repairs helped support the family.
3) In the 1950s, as an engineering student at MIT, he bought an expensive stereo system. But disappointed with the sound quality, he began thinking of ways to improve it. His private research showed that 80% of the sound at concerts and cinema halls reached the listener’s ears indirectly, ie., after bouncing off walls, furniture, etc. This was in direct contrast to stereo systems of that time that sent out sound waves directly to the listener.
He devised a system with several small speakers aimed in different directions rather than at the listener so as to allow the sound waves to bounce off walls. His idea was to simulate what he had at concerts. His early efforts weren’t very successful but encouraged by his mentor at MIT, Dr YW Lee, he set up Bose Corporation in 1964 to pursue his interest in acoustic engineering.
4) He developed the Bose noise cancellation headphones, which are now standard equipment for defence forces and airlines around the world and the Bose Wave Radio.
5) In the early 1980s, premium car brands such as Mercedes Benz and Porsche selected Bose Corporation as their audio equipment supplier. Even today, Bose speakers can be found in many high end cars as original equipment. Bose, a keen badminton player and enthusiastic swimmer, was also interested in Hindu philosophy. His students remember his classes as being as much about the science of sound as about life and philosophy.
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6) For initial capital to fund his company in 1964, Amar Bose turned to angel investors, including his MIT thesis advisor and professor, Dr. Y. W. Lee. Bose was awarded significant patents in two fields that continue to be important to the Bose Corporation. These patents were in the area of loud speaker design and non-linear, two-state modulated, Class-D, power processing.
7) Bose’s first contracts came with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for improving audio communications. His focus on psychoacoustics later became a hallmark of his company`s audio products.
8) His son, Vanu Bose, is the founder and CEO of Vanu, Inc., a firm whose software-based radio technology provides a wireless infrastructure that enables individual base stations to simultaneously operate GSM, CDMA, and iDEN protocols for cellphone voice and data transmission.
9) In a 2004 interview in Popular Science magazine, he said: “I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.”
10) In 2011 he donated a majority of his Copany’s shares to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology–where he studied engineering and where he taught for 45 years from 1956–on the condition that it wouldn’t sell the shares or participate in the management.
11) Bose systems can be found in stadiums and, interestingly, at the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican too.
