Amar Bose
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Amar Gopal Bose (Bengali: অমর গোপাল বসু Ômor Gopal Boshu) (born 1929) is the chairman and founder of Bose Corporation. He is an Indian American electrical engineer.
Bose was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; his father, Nani Gopal Bose, was an Indian freedom revolutionary from Bengal who having been imprisoned for his political activities, fled (Calcutta) Kolkata in the 1920s in order to avoid further prosecution by the British colonial police.
Amar Bose attended Abington Senior High School and later obtained a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His PhD thesis was a highly mathematical treatise of non-linear systems.
Amar Bose first displayed his entrepreneurial skills and his interest in technology at age thirteen, when, during World War-II years, he enlisted school friends as co-workers in a small home business repairing model trains and home radios, to supplement his family's income.
Not yet wealthy, Bose entered MIT as a work-study student with a great deal of practical experience in electronics. After six years, he was graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering in the early 1950s. Bose spent a year in Eindhoven, Netherlands, in the reserch labs at NV Philips Electronics and a year in New Dehli, India, as a Fullbright student where he then met his future wife, Prema, from whom he is now divorced.
On return to MIT as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bose embarked on research in acoustics that led him to invent a stereo loudspeaker that would reproduce, in a domestic setting, the dominantly reflected sound field that characterizes the listening space of the audience in a concert hall.
Bose was awarded significant patents in two fields which, to this day, are 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. To found his company in 1964, for initial capital, he turned to angel investors including his MIT thesis advisor and professor, Dr. Y. W. Lee (who bet his life savings on the effort).
During his early years as an electrical engineering professor, Bose bought a high-end stereo speaker system in 1956 and was reportedly underwhelmed by the performance of his purchase. This would eventually pave the way for his extensive speaker technology research, concentrating on key weaknesses in the high-end speaker systems available during Bose's time, and focusing on psychoacoustics, which would become a hallmark of the company's audio products.
Today, the Bose Corporation is a multifaceted entity with more than 8,000 employees, worldwide, that produces products for home, car, and professional audio, as well as conducts basic research in acoustics, automotive systems, and other fields.
In addition to running his company, Bose was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT for many years until he retired after the Fall 2000 term maintaining title of professor and still teaching an acoustics class.
Bose was featured on the 2006 Forbes 400 with $1.5 billion.
His son, Vanu Bose, is also a successful high-technology entrepreneur. His daughter, Maiya, is a practicing chiropractor. He maintains homes in Wayland, Massachusetts, and in Hawai'i. He is married to Ursula Boltzhauser, a senior manager at BOSE Corportion. They have no children.
[edit] Awards
1987 Inventor Of The Year - Acoustic waveguide speaker technology garners praise from the scientific community, earning Dr. Bose and Dr. William Short "Inventor of the Year" honors.
