[Courtesy : PlanetJV - Jay Vasavada - http://planetjv.wordpress.com/2013/07/21 ]
An INTERVIEW IN ENGLISH FOLLOWS AFTER THE LINKS .................
AMAR BOSE
બોઝ-બેઝ
આજના આ સ્પેકટ્રોમીટરનાં લેખમાં
અમર ગોપાલ બોઝ વિષે વાંચ્યું હશે. ના હોય તો પહેલા એ વાંચી લો, પ્લીઝ. કારણ કે આ પોસ્ટ
એની પુરવણી રૂપે છે.
જેમને સાયન્સ, રિસર્ચ અને એજ્યુકેશનથી મળતી સફળતામાં જેન્યુઈન રસ છે, એમના માટે બોઝબાબુને લગતી થોડી અગત્યની પુરક માહિતી.
* અહીં આ પેજ પરની
તમામ લિંકસ વન બાય વન વાંચો, અને લાઈવ નિહાળો…વિદેશમાં રોડ પર ખાડા ઓછા હોવાને લીધે અને ભારત જેવા દેશોમાં એ
માટે ખર્ચવાના પૈસા ઓછા હોવાને લીધે ઉમદા હોવા છતાં હજુ સાચા ‘રસ્તે’ના ચડેલી અનોખી
સસ્પેન્શન સીસ્ટમનો સરળ ચિતાર : સસ્પેન્સ ઓફ કાર સસ્પેન્શન
* આ સૌથી અગત્યની
લિંક છે, બોઝનું રિસર્ચ એન્ડ
ડેવલપમેન્ટ ડીપાર્ટમેન્ટ કેવું હતું ? : અહીં ક્લિક કરી વાંચો
* અમેરિકન લશ્કરમાં
બોઝ સિસ્ટમનું પ્રદાન શું ? : અહીં નિહાળો
અને અમર ગોપાલ બોઝનો એક યાદગાર ઇન્ટરવ્યુ , સાયન્સ
મેગેઝીન “ડિસ્કવર”માં ૨૦૦૪માં
છપાયેલો :
Amar G. Bose, 74, founder, owner, and chairman of the
Bose Corporation, rocked the automotive world in August by unveiling a
suspension system that could make all others obsolete. It uses
computer-controlled electric motors to effectively cancel a road’s bumps and
dips, giving occupants a glass-smooth ride. The system, more than two decades
in development, is expected to show up on cars within four years. It may seem
like an unlikely breakthrough from what many regard as a high-end speaker
company, but since its founding in 1964, Bose has conquered science and
engineering challenges in a variety of fields. The company, which employs 8,000
people, reflects its maverick founder and offers a unique model for
revitalizing American corporate research and development. Bose was a professor
of electrical engineering at MIT for 45 years.
Your father was from Calcutta and was a vocal opponent of
British rule in India. When did he come to the United States?
B: He arrived at Ellis Island in 1920 with five
dollars in his pocket.
Your mother was American. Was your upbringing more Indian
or American?
B: We had a small house in suburban
Philadelphia, and Indian people would come stay with us for days, weeks, or
months. The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very
deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian
household. There were challenges. The prejudice was so bad in the United States
at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a
restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit
there, and the food would never come. My father would ask for the manager. He
would pretend to be an African American because the prejudice was against them,
not Indians. He would say in a quiet voice: “I notice that we are good enough
to earn money to cook the food, good enough to earn money serving the food,
good enough to give our lives in the war for our country. Could you explain to
me why it is that we are not good enough to pay money and eat the food?” When
he spoke in a quiet voice like that, everyone in the whole restaurant would
fall silent, too, and listen to it. Then he would say to my mother and me, “It
is time for us to go.”
You admired him?
B: Yes. He lectured from Philadelphia to Washington,
D.C., for 15 years for the Indian underground movement, describing the
atrocities he had seen under British rule in India that were not unlike those
in Nazi Germany.
When did you get into electronics?
B: I joined the Boy Scouts when I was 12. One of the
other scouts had a radio transmitter. I learned that if I correlated the parts
in the transmitter with a diagram, I could learn to read schematic drawings. At
13, I realized that I could fix anything electronic. It was amazing, I could
just do it. I started a business repairing radios. It grew to be one of the
largest in Philadelphia.
When you went to MIT to study electrical engineering in
1947, what was your goal?
B: I really wanted to do research. That has never
changed.
When did you get into acoustics and speaker design?
B: I had studied violin from age 7 to 14. I loved
music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured
that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked
like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound
was so poor. I was so curious to find out why. In the spring of 1956, I went to
India to teach on a Fulbright scholarship, and I read about acoustics at night.
In a concert hall, only a tiny bit of the sound comes to you directly; most of
it arrives after many reflections from the surfaces of the room. Only about 2
percent of the sound is absorbed with each reflection, so there are many, many
reflections. Yet people had been designing loudspeakers that only radiate
forward. We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we
measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience,
then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them.
When you started your company in 1964, was your intention
to do research?
B: Yes. That’s still the case. One hundred percent of
our earnings are reinvested in the company, and a great deal of that goes to
research.
Did you have lean times because of that commitment?
B: Sure. There were a couple of times when we were
within two weeks of being nonexistent. We passed narrowly over the fire.
Couldn’t you have survived by going public?
B: Yes, but that would have destroyed everything.
You would rather have let the company die than go public?
B: Yes. There was a time when I was wondering about
this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the
Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public. Every
one of those CEOs said: “If only we had known the consequences, we never would
have gone public. We are spending two-thirds of our time on image building to
keep the stock price up.”
Are you the sole owner?
B: Well, I own the vast majority.
So you can set any research goal you choose?
B: Yes. I formed this company solely for the
excitement of doing really unique research.
Talk about your nonaudio research.
B: Well, one was cold fusion. Martin Fleischmann and
Stanley Pons came out with this result [that power-producing atomic fusion
reactions could occur at subthermonuclear temperatures] in 1989. I went to a
conference at MIT where the chemists and the physicists were literally shouting
at one another about it. I said, by God, I am going to assemble a team and find
out if this exists or not. We worked for two years. We spent a year simply
perfecting measuring systems. Then we repeated experiments that had been done
by others. We verified an experiment similar to that of Fleischmann and Pons
and were about to break out the champagne bottles. But then one of our team
members checked a recombinant [chemical] reaction that had been regarded by
everyone else as negligible in this type of experiment. Bang, there was the
energy. Take that out and all of the experiments came to zero. The paper we
produced had a significant impact.
But this yielded nothing to the Bose Corporation’s bottom
line?
B: That’s right [laughs]. But it was interesting.
What about other research?
B: It used to be that the systems that amplified
audio signals or converted power were very inefficient. I got interested
because one day in 1960 I was lying on my couch, and there was a 100-watt
stereo amplifier near my head, and it was pouring out huge quantities of heat.
I thought, my God,
isn’t there a way to design an amplifier that does not
boil you when you listen to it? That heat was a result of inefficiency. We came
up with a technology that can bring efficiencies into the 90 percent range. All
military and most commercial aircraft use our designs that process power from
jet engines.
What about the auto-suspension research?
B: All of the other attempts to look at an automotive
suspension focused on the hardware first—for example, how do you optimize the
performance of a hydraulic system? We did it differently. We chose to determine
mathematically the best that a system’s performance could be. Only then did we
embark on a search for how to do it. We looked at all of the other technologies
that were and are available, and the only way to do it was electromagnetically,
the linear-motor approach.
It wasn’t easy, was it?
B: No, we spent 24 years on this project.
There aren’t many companies that would invest 24 years on
any project.
B: Research in this country is going down. Prior to
World War II, the United States was rather poor in research; that’s why radar
was invented in England and Germany. We learned the value of research in World
War II. But today the quickest way to save your bottom line is to cut off
research. In the automobile industry, for example, the average CEO’s tenure is
just 4.7 years, so the money you spend on research won’t help while you are
CEO. That’s why there is great pressure to do something that will sell now, but
on a national basis this kind of ethic is very dangerous.
Do you feel that you, personally, are as creative as
you’ve ever been?
B: Yes, it is still what I love. The excitement level
for me working on projects is really not a bit different from when I was 26.
You are 74. What will ultimately happen to the company?
B: I’m forming a charitable institution for
education. At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network
theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate
student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level
of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations. I hope that the
institution will succeed in maximizing students’ potential in the same way. I
will give all of my stock to this institution. It will own the Bose Corporation
and be funded by the Bose Corporation.
