Amar Bose: Difference between revisions

Amar Gopal Bose (Bengali: অমর গোপাল বসু ; born November 2, 1929) is an American electrical engineer, sound engineer and multi-millionaire entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairman of Bose Corporation.

In the year 2007 (Forbes 400), he was listed as 271st richest man in the world, with a net worth of $1.8 billion^[1]. In 2009, he had dropped off the billionaire list and although he is yet to make it back to the list, remains worth hundreds of millions^[2].

Bose was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a Bengali Indian father and a white American mother. His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was an Indian freedom revolutionary ^[3], who having been imprisoned for his political activities, fled Calcutta in the 1920s in order to avoid further prosecution by the British colonial police.

Amar Bose first displayed his entrepreneurial skills and his interest in electronics at age thirteen, when, during the 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.^[4]

Bose enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in the early 1950s. Bose spent a year in Eindhoven, Netherlands, in the research labs at NV Philips Electronics and a year in New Delhi, India, as a Fulbright research student where he met his future wife Prema (from whom he is now divorced). He completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT, writing a highly mathematical thesis on non-linear systems.

Following graduation, Bose took a position at MIT as an Assistant Professor. He focused his research on acoustics, leading 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.

During his early years as a 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. Applying similar psychoacoustic principles to headphone technology, Bose created the "Tri-Port Earcup Drivers." Today, the Bose Corporation is a multifaceted entity with more than 12,000 employees, worldwide, that produces products for home, car, and professional audio, as well as conducts basic research in acoustics, automotive systems, and other fields.

Bose Corporation, as a privately held company, does not publish its financial records, however a few hundred shareholders do receive audited annual financial statements.

In addition to running his company, Bose remained a professor at MIT until 2000.

Bose says that his best ideas usually come to him in a flash. "These innovations are not the result of rational thought; it's an intuitive idea." Popular Science Dec 2004

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. His daughter, Maya, is a practicing chiropractor.

• Elected Fellow of IEEE, 1972 - for contributions to loudspeaker design, two-state amplifier-modulators, and nonlinear systems.

• Short biography of Amar Gopal Bose
• Bose at MIT
• Doctoral Thesis
• Bose Breakthrough: Electromagnetic Auto Suspension
• A History of Bose
• Discover Dialogue: Amar G. Bose
• Bose Founder Discusses Audio Perfection and Digital Music