The Indian Space Programme

by Gurbir Singh

  During his time in Europe, he would have seen steam engines, cotton mills, mechanised production, new shift working patterns and their collective capacity to improve the quality of life for ordinary people. Roy would never return to India. During a visit to the southern English city of Bristol, Roy became ill and died on 27 September 1833. His biographer later wrote that Roy “stands in history as the living bridge over which India marches from her unmeasured past to her incalculable future. He was the arch which spanned the gulf that yawned between ancient caste and modern humanity, between superstition and science.”[178] Though Roy died prematurely, his vision and achievements inspired those who came after him.

  Another early visionary who contributed profoundly towards establishing a framework for scientific and technical education in India was Sir Asutosh Mookerjee, mathematician, physicist and an industrious administrator. He helped establish the Bengal Technical Institute in 1906, the Calcutta Mathematical Society in 1908 and the College of Science, Calcutta University, in 1914. The first postgraduate courses in science in 1913 were the product of his efforts. Mookerjee was highly influential and nurtured the careers of many Indian scientists who made a mark in science in the first half of the 20th century, including Srinivas Ramanujan (1887–1920), C.V. Raman, J.C. Bose, S.N. Bose (1894–1974) and Meghnad Saha.

  By the late 19th century, the ripples of the European scientific revolution were reaching all parts of the globe. Rapid communication, made possible through the telegraph, telephone and radio communication, was as transformative in its time as the Internet is today. While the primary objective of The British East India Company, the biggest company ever to have existed, was to make a profit for its shareholders, it realised that a few thousand Englishmen could not govern a nation of millions. So, it engaged Indians locally and introduced the methods and products of modern technology. Britain ended up becoming the conduit for India to absorb the methods and techniques of scientific investigation. Gifted and curious Indians engaged and helped embed the principles and the role of science in India and established a vision for India’s future development based on science.

  Colonial power was not always suppressive. Outside the domain of politics and military, Indians with exceptional talent were encouraged by the British and European academia “if there was an Indian who was competent they would definitely support and help him.”[179] For example, Lord Rayleigh supported Jagadish Chandra Bose during the 1880s, Ernest Rutherford guided C.V. Raman since the 1920s and nominated him for Nobel Prize in 1930 and Albert Einstein's (1879–1955) participation cemented international recognition for Satyendra Nath Bose's contributions. Without Godfrey Hardy (1847–1947) and John Littlewood (1885–1977) nurturing Ramanujan’s career in Cambridge between 1914 and 1919, the world would have lost out on one of India’s greatest mathematical genius.

  Jagadish Chandra Bose

  Jagadish Chandra Bose was one of the first Indian scientists to conduct pioneering experimental research in science that attracted worldwide recognition. He was born in Bengal in 1858, the same year that the control of India moved from the East India Company to the British government. Bose wanted to study for the highly sought after Indian Civil Service exams, but his father guided him to “rule nobody but himself ... [and] become a scholar, not an administrator.”[180]

  Bose attended St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he studied under Father Eugène Lafont, a key promoter of IACS during its early days and the founder of St. Xavier’s College Observatory. Perhaps, it was Lafont's enthusiasm for experimental science that drew Bose initially to science. After graduation, Bose initially went to study medicine at the University of London in 1880 and then moved to Cambridge two years later to study natural sciences. It was there that he first came in contact with Lord Rayleigh and developed a strong relationship that prevailed for many years after Bose left Cambridge. With a Bachelor of Arts from the University of London and a Bachelor of Science from Cambridge, Bose returned to India in 1885 as a professor of physics at Presidency College in Calcutta, as recommended by Lord Rayleigh.

  Figure 4‑1 Jagadish Chandra Bose at the Royal Society in London. Credit Wikimedia Commons

  As the first Indian to hold a senior position as a professor, he was offered half the salary of a British professor. He signalled his indignation by accepting the role but not the salary. It took three years of service as an unpaid professor for authorities to relent and pay a salary equal to that of his British peers, backdating it to his start date.[181] Bose replaced the traditionally spoken lectures with practical experiments, and his teaching was innovative, effective and very popular. Bose’s hands-on teaching style was probably the influence of his physics teacher, Father Eugène Lafont and in turn possibly passed on to his student, C.V Raman. The annual report of IACS for 1886 states that Bose conducted seven practical demonstrations on electricity and magnetism.[182].

  Bose is known for his contribution to the development of radio. He designed and built equipment to generate, transmit and receive radio waves. Bose first demonstrated the potential for radio communication in 1894 when he triggered the explosion of a small sample of gunpowder using radio waves. This ‘action at a distance’ in the absence of a physical mediator must have appeared like magic for most of those who witnessed it. In the history of telecommunication, 12 December 1901 was a watershed moment. On that day, Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) transmitted a man-made radio signal, three dots representing the letter ‘S’, from southern England across the Atlantic to his colleagues in Newfoundland 2,174.8 miles (3,500 km) away.[183] Marconi’s success, however, relied on something that is argued to have been invented by Bose, an electrical component called a coherer.[184] [185]

  A coherer was a key component in the development of early radio receivers. When first used in 1891 in Paris, it was a small tube filled with iron filings with an electrical connection (an electrode) at each end. In the presence of radio waves, the iron filings lined up or ‘cohered’ and made a connection between the two electrodes completing a circuit and triggering the detection of radio waves. However, once the iron filings cohered, they remained cohered until the tube was manually shaken to allow the iron filings to fall away from the electrodes and re-enable the coherer’s ability to detect radio waves once more. Bose designed and built a coherer that would recover automatically and continuously without manual intervention, making possible the first ever man-made radio transmission.

  On 27 April 1899, his paper titled ‘On a self-recovering coherer and study of cohering action of different materials’ was read by Lord Rayleigh at the Royal Society in London, and this coherer was publicly described as Bose’s invention.[186] However, just prior to the publication of his paper on 27 April 1899, Bose had been encouraged by a multi-millionaire proprietor of a telegraph company not to go public with details of his invention but to patent it for money. Bose went out of his way to declare that he had no interest in the notion of personal wealth. He was content with solving an intellectual challenge that addressed a real-world problem.

  In a personal letter on 17 May 1901 to his friend Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), another Bengali polymath, who in 1913 achieved international success with a Nobel Prize in Literature, Bose wrote “If I once get sucked into this terrible trap, there won’t be any escape! See, the research that I have been dedicated to doing is above commercial profits.”[187] Seven months later, Marconi filed the patent for the self-recovering coherer under his own name. The self-recovering coherer turned out to have been a significant stepping stone in the development of radio communication. Bose was openly credited at the time, but many argue that his contribution has not been fully recognised even today.

  In 1904, Bose was persuaded to file a patent for his galena-based coherer.[188] His use of galena (a lead-rich mineral) in his coherer was the first practical use of a semiconductor in electronics. The concepts of a conductor (materials through which electricity can pass, for example, copper) and non-conductor (materials through wh
ich electricity cannot pass, for example, wood) were well understood before Bose’s time. However, at the time, semi-conductors were new. Today, all modern computer systems, computer memory and microprocessors that are made using microscopic integrated circuits, rely on semiconductors. In addition to the coherer, he developed a number of specialised devices familiar to radio engineers today, such as waveguides, horn antennas, dielectric lenses, interferometers, couplers and absorbers.[189]

  Bose was also the first person to identify and work with microwaves, which today are used for radar, telecommunication and domestic appliances. Michael Faraday’s work in the early 19th century revealed light as the radiation of vibrating electric and magnetic fields travelling at the speed of light. Visible light was only a subset of all possible frequencies. The different frequencies are grouped into radio, microwave, light, infrared, all the way up to gamma-rays; collectively, they make up the electromagnetic spectrum. Low-frequency radio waves can have a wavelength of thousands of kilometres and are used underwater by submarines for communication, while high-frequency gamma-rays at a tiny wavelength, the size of an atom, are used to detect some of the most violent events in the universe, like supernovae.

  The wavelength of the radio waves that Marconi used for his historic transmission in 1901 was initially considered to be around 366 m, but in a recorded lecture in the 1930s, Marconi said it was 1,800 m.[190] Bose experimented with short wavelengths (a few millimetres), which are now categorised as microwaves. Bose’s interest was not restricted to experimental science. In 1896, he published Niruddesher Kahini (The Story of the Missing One), a science fiction work that earned him the epithet ‘father of science fiction’ in India. But Bose was not the first in India to explore the realm of science fiction. Jagadananda Roy (1869–1933), another writer of Bengali origin, had published Shukra Bhraman (Travels to Venus) in 1879. Roy imagined large, hairy ape-like inhabitants of Venus a decade before H.G. Wells described his slender, big-eyed, intelligent Martians in The War of the Worlds. Bose was knighted in 1917, and he became a Fellow of the Royal Society three years later. As a polymath, his research interests were broad and included archaeology, botany, physics and biology. Many of his experiments straddled multiple disciplines and dealt with questions in physics and biology at the same time. He demonstrated the effects of electromagnetic waves on animate and inanimate matter.

  Bose was unique among his scientific contemporaries. Despite his systematic pursuit of knowledge guided by the scientific method, in 1911, he distinguished the Western reductionist approach from his Eastern approach, which attempted to comprehend and combine the multiplicity of phenomena available for observation. Perhaps influenced by ancient Indian spirituality and the belief in ‘cosmic unity’, he wrote to his friend Rabindranath Tagore on 30 August 1901 saying “there is a great gap between the living and the non-living. I was experimenting on the responses of plants to make a connection between the two. Just now I got the results; Same, Same, all are the Same.”[191]

  Srinivasa Ramanujan

  Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) was an extraordinary mathematician, who lived a short but extremely productive life. Considered by some as a savant and a social misfit, he was recognised as India’s greatest mathematician by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–1995), winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. Ramanujan produced exceptionally original work in pure mathematics that confounded many of his peers at the time and continues to inspire mathematicians today. His theorems are being applied in the 21st century in areas as varied as polymer chemistry, crystallography, computing and medicine.

  Ramanujan was born into a family of average means in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. His short life was marked by regular periods of illness. It started at the age of two with a smallpox infection. Before Ramanujan was seven years old, he had lost his next three siblings to smallpox within months after birth.[192] Largely self-taught, he excelled in mathematics but showed no aptitude for or interest in any other subject.

  Ramanujan completed his formal education at the age of 18 succeeding only in mathematics. This failure in every subject except mathematics and the resulting loss of his scholarship triggered a brief disappearance in 1907.[193] He made his first appearance in a newspaper as the subject of a missing person report. He turned up safe a few days later.[194] In 1909, he married a 10-year-old girl as arranged by his mother although they did not live together until three years later. Motivated by his failure to get into a university and facing the responsibilities of a married man, he found work as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust on a salary of Rs.30 per month (￡20 per annum).[195] Confident of his unique mathematical skills, Ramanujan set out to find a sponsor to support him to continue to study his beloved mathematics. He solicited several individuals. In 1913, it began to pay off when he established contact with Gilbert Walker (1868–1958). Walker from Rochdale in England but was then based in Shimla as the Head of the Meteorological Department of India.

  He was a former lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. Although they did not meet, Walker inspected Ramanujan’s notebooks personally during a visit to Madras (now Chennai) on 25 February 1913. In the absence of formal mathematical training, Ramanujan’s approach was idiosyncratic, unconventional and difficult for others to follow. Walker noted that Ramanujan’s work was “lacking in the precision and completeness necessary for establishing the universal validity of the results.”[196] Nevertheless, impressed by what he saw, Walker contacted Madras University on the following day recommending that “it would be justified in enabling S. Ramanujan for a few years at least to spend the whole of his time on mathematics without any anxiety as to his livelihood.”[197]In response, Madras University offered Ramanujan, who had no formal university entry qualifications, a 2-year scholarship of Rs.75 per month (￡60 per annum) as the University’s first research scholar.[198]

  Walker made one other recommendation without which Ramanujan’s contribution in mathematics would have been lost to the world. Walker asked Madras University to contact his former colleague, G.H. Hardy, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and “assure Mr Hardy of their interest in him.”[199] Hardy was a leading mathematician of his time. By chance, Ramanujan had already written to Hardy six weeks prior to Walker’s visit, asking Hardy “to go through the enclosed papers. Being poor, if you are convinced that there is anything of value I would like to have my theorems published.’[200] Examining Ramanujan’s papers, Hardy’s conclusions were similar to Walker's. He saw in Ramanujan’s work evidence of intuition, induction and at times mingled argument, hunches and guesses. His written arguments were not coherent and almost always lacked mathematical proof. Nevertheless, Hardy recognised (as Walker had done) Ramanujan’s underlying mathematical gift and invited Ramanujan to Cambridge.

  Glowing recommendations from an authoritative individual, such as Hardy, based in an elite institution like Cambridge prompted Madras University to offer Ramanujana scholarship of￡250 per year plus￡100 for passage. Once he received assurances that he would not need to pay his expenses or undertake any further examination upon arrival in Britain, that his level of English would suffice and that he could remain a vegetarian, Ramanujan agreed to go. He left Madras on 17 March 1914 on the S.S. Nevasa and arrived in London three weeks later. His period of stay in the Britain almost identically matched the duration of World War I. Research at Cambridge had continued through the War years although at a subdued pace. The number of students had gone down from 700 to 150 by November 1915. Ramanujan wrote to his mother in India on 11 September 1915 to alleviate her concerns about his safety stating that there was no war in the England but in neighbouring countries, “as far from me as Rangoon is from Madras.”[201]

  In his five years at Cambridge, Ramanujan published 21 papers (some jointly with other authors) containing theorems on leading mathematical themes, including asymptotic formulae, infinite series, definite integrals, summation of series, modular equations, Riemann zeta function, analytic number theory, combinatorial analysis, pa
rtitions and modular functions. One paper for the Journal of the London Mathematical Society published in 1915 consisted of 62 pages with 269 equations. Despite his unconventional mathematical approach and the peculiarities of his spoken and written English, the brilliance of his original thought shone through. An official report on Ramanujan’s work for the registrar of Cambridge University stated “India has produced many talented mathematicians in recent years, a number of who have come to Cambridge and attained high academic distinction. They will be the first to recognise that Mr Ramanujan’s work is of a different category.”[202]

  A well-known anecdote that illustrates Ramanujan’s mathematical genius is a conversation between Hardy and Ramanujan. Hardy recalls “I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”[203] The sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed is 1729 and so is the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed (1729 = 13 + 123 = 93 + 103). The sums of the cubes of any other pairs of numbers will be higher than 1729, never lower. During his time in the UK, Hardy coached Ramanujan but with utmost care. Ramanujan exhibited an innate mathematical ability, and he had been largely self-taught. It is interesting to speculate: had he gone through formal training, would it have extinguished his genius?