Amar Bose

He married Prema whom he had met as a research scholar while in New Delhi. The couple had two children and later divorced.

He died in 2013 at the age of 83.

Amar Bose was born to a Bengali father and American mother in Pennsylvania. His father, Noni Gopal Bose had been an Indian freedom fighter who was often imprisoned for his political activities, thus he fled to the U.S. His mother, Charlotte was of French and German ancestry and worked as a school teacher.

He went to the Abington Senior High School from where he graduated. He displayed an interest in electronics from a young age and used to dismantle radio sets and study them.

During the World War II, his father’s business of importing coconut-fiber doormats from India became impossible due to shipping restrictions. Amar suggested that they start a radio repair shop and he spent his evenings after school repairing radios and supplementing the family income.

Impressed with his young son’s talents, his father decided to send him to the best college possible, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His father borrowed $10, 000 in 1947 and sent his son to the MIT.

He was meant to study in the MIT for two years, but ended up staying there for nine during the course of which he completed his BS and went on to earn his PhD in Electrical Engineering for his thesis on non-linear systems.

A lover of classical music, he bought an expensive stereo system which was theoretically supposed to produce high quality sound. However on using it he found that it produced very inferior sound, a realization that motivated him to research on the topic.

Upon his graduation he became an Assistant Professor in MIT though he was equally interested in research. He went on teach at MIT for 45 years.

During the early 1960s, he invented a new type of stereo speaker which made use of multiple smaller speakers. His PhD mentor at the MIT, Dr. Y. W. Lee motivated him to pursue long term research in acoustics. Thus in 1964, he founded his own company, the Bose Corporation that specialized in audio equipment.

Bose was striving to create the next generation of speakers. By 1968, he introduced the 901 Direct/Reflecting speaker system which helped to establish him as the market leader in the audio components market.

He continued his pioneering research in this field and invented the Bose Wave radio and the Bose noise-cancelling headphones. These inventions were so successful that they were adopted by pilots in both the military and commercial sectors.

He founded the Bose Corporation in 1964 which is a company that manufactures high quality audio equipment. As on today it operates eight plants, 152 retail stores and employs more than 9,000 employees. The company is best known for its loudspeakers and automotive sound systems.