Italian MARCONI STOLE Indian JC Bose's INVENTION AND APPLIED FOR A
PATENT IN UK
Incontrovertible evidence is presented to show that this novel wireless
detection device was invented by Sir. J. C. Bose of Presidency College,
Calcutta, India TWO YEARS before Marconi applied for a patent in UK.
http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~murthy/sirjcbose.pdf
PROBIR K. BONDYOPADHYAY, SENIOR MEMBER, IEEE
The true origin of the “mercury coherer with a telephone”
receiver that was used by G. Marconi to receive the first transatlantic
wireless signal on December 12, 1901, has been investigated
and determined. Incontrovertible evidence is presented to show
that this novel wireless detection device was invented by Sir.
J. C. Bose of Presidency College, Calcutta, India. His epochmaking
work was communicated by Lord Rayleigh, F.R.S., to the
Royal Society, London, U.K., on March 6, 1899, and read at the
Royal Society Meeting of Great Britain on April 27, 1899. Soon
after, it was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Twenty-one months after that disclosure (in February 1901, as the
records indicate), Lieutenant L. Solari of the Royal Italian Navy, a
childhood friend of G. Marconi’s, experimented with this detector
device and presented a trivially modified version to Marconi, who
then applied for a British patent on the device. Surrounded by a
scandal, this detection device, actually a semiconductor diode, is
known to the outside world as the “Italian Navy Coherer.” This
scandal, first brought to light by Prof. A. Banti of Italy, has been
critically analyzed and expertly presented in a time sequence of
events by British historian V. J. Phillips but without discovering
the true origin of the novel detector. In this paper, the scandal is
revisited and the mystery of the device’s true origin is solved, thus
correcting the century-old misinformation on an epoch-making
chapter in the history of semiconductor devices.