Here is another piece.. The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi holds a secure place in the history books for decoding the first wireless message sent across the Atlantic Ocean. That achievement ushered in the modern era of electronic communications. But it also triggered a century-long debate over who should get the credit for developing the receiving device that captured the famous message. This month, an article in a special issue of The Proceedings of the IEEE makes a definitive case for Jagadis Chandra Bose, an Indian biologist and physicist. Bose announced the invention in an 1899 paper presented at the Royal Society in London, writes a satellite and communications engineer at Johnson Space Center in Houston who is also an amateur historian. Read more

A view from Prof Rajesh Kochhar Director, National Institute of Science, Technology & Development Studies (NISTADS).. on this question.. Bose is one of the founding fathers of radio-physics, whose research acted as a bridge between the original discovery by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz and practical use by Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi shared the 1909 physics Nobel prize. Had Hertz been alive {he died in 1894), then he would probably have been similarly honoured. Did Marconi cheat Bose? A story in The Telegraph (December 1997) carried the rather sensational title "Bose invented Marconi's wireless". The story was based on a recent report by some US- based Indian engineers that the detecting device (or coherer as it was then called) that Marconi used, the so- called Italian navy coherer, was modified from an instrument invented by Bose two years previously. Read more

I just had a discussion with a friend on Marconi and Bose and the Wireless invention. There is strong evidence that Jagdish Bose and NOT Marconi was the real inventor of Wireless!! Nearly 100 years after Guglielmo Marconi's first transatlantic wireless communication, a group of scientists of the US-based Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) reported that -"the origin and first major use of the solid state diode detector devices led to the discovery that the first transatlantic wireless signal in Marconi's world famous experiment was received by Marconi using the iron-mercury-iron coherer with a telephone detector invented by Sir J.C.Bose in 1898". Read more