Serial inventor Dr Amar Bose has made his namesake American company, the world's best brand in audio systems. Now at 81, he has taken on video as well. From Anand ParthasarathyI

t was 1960. Amar G. Bose, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was at home, relaxing on a couch and listening to music playing from a 100 watt stereo system he had recently acquired. Positioned just above his head, the amplifier was sending waves of heat all over him. ‘Can’t they design an amplifier that doesn’t boil the listener?’, Bose asked himself. He knew, that the more heat the system radiated heat, the less efficient it was, when it came to amplifying sound with fidelity.

A music lover who had learnt to play the violin when he was seven, Bose decided right there, that a better, more efficient audio amplifier system was needed. And there if wasn’t one around, he would make one.

Four years later the Bose Corporation was born -- the numerous patents that he earned in acoustics and electronics, while he obtained his doctorate at MIT, were the core assets of the new entity. Bose discovered that the hi-fi loud speakers of the time were based on a fundamentally wrong design premise, because they radiated sound only in one direction: forward. In real life, as Bose discovered after many hours listening to and recording the Boston Symphony Orchestra, only a tiny fraction of sound reaches listeners in a concert hall directly. Most of it, undergoes multiple reflections en route. The knowledge was to help the fledgling company, launch its first product in 1968: the '901 Direct/Reflecting Speaker'. It blended reflected and direct sound to stunningly recreate the sound experienced in a real auditorium. In the half century since then, Bose has become arguably the best known, most respected global brand name for life-like sound reproduction -- and for a whole gallery of audio products for discerning professionals and lay customers. Even as Bose continued to teach at MIT -- he held the position of professor, taking classes for 45 years till 2001 -- Bose Corporation, a global player with operations in six countries and close to 9000 employees worldwide, rolled out innovations in acoustics engineering with metronomic regularity , often triggered by the founder’s personal experience.

While on a transatlantic flight in the mid 1970s, he found that listening to the sound-track of a movie on the headphones that were provided, was a very poor experience, with so much aircraft noise coming through. Why could headphones not cut out the outside noise, he asked himself. After almost 10 years of research, Bose unveiled with the revolutionary Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphone, where active circuits sense the unwanted noise signals, cancel them out by generating an equal and opposite signal. The “noise-fighting” headsets were first offered as professional items for civil and military pilots and it took another 10 years – till 2000 -- before the Bose Quiet Comfort headphones offered the same technology to lay users at a more affordable price… bringing the gift of silence to millions of customers hassled by ambient noise.
Around the same time as the development of ‘silent’ headphones, another engineering team at Bose – now headquartered just outside Boston in labs built on a hill overlooking Framingham – was working on another ‘wish list’ item of audiophiles everywhere: How to get the best sound from an audio system, even when one lacked the space to install massive speakers and electronics. Bose’s answer was the Waveguide: a system where a long sound channel, narrow at one end, wide at the other, is made to zigzag through the equipment before it provides the rich, low notes that would normally take huge speaker systems to deliver. The inspiration was the flute Dr Bose used to play, where the actual path of the sound wave is many times longer than the pipe. Typically, the first commercial product to exploit the Waveguide -- the Bose Radio – was launched in 1993, almost a decade after Bose and fellow engineer William Short co-invented the technology.
The Waveguide has enabled Bose Corp. to squeeze incredible acoustics into palm-sized products like the Wave CD-based music player and the iPod Sound Dock… and allows Dr Bose to play his own parlour trick: covering the system with a big box and asking listeners to guess how big the speakers are. The incredible shrinking headphone, has morphed at Bose, into tiny, in-ear phones which sit snugly in the natural bowl of the ear, turning the listener’s ear canal, into a natural boom box.The founder-inventor is still passionate about simplifying consumer sound systems: the Wave Music System has no buttons or controls – just one credit card sized remote.
But time -- and entertainment trends -- catch up with the best of technology. Today’s typical Bose customer is into video as much as into audio – and the latest product from Framingham, just launched in India and elsewhere, is recognition of the fact. It is also the first consumer offering from Bose that offers more than sound. After 45 years of serving pure sound, Bose has launched 'VideoWave, a complete home theatre system that marries Bose-class sound to high definition TV. ( see  our review in the Products section)
That may sound like a course correction for the Sultan of Sound – but it is nothing as radical as another technology line that Dr Bose helped launch some 6 years ago: a suspension system for road vehicles, which replaces an electro-mechanical solution with an electronic one. It is in its basics very similar to the underlying principle of noise cancelling headphones: a lightning fast mathematical processor gauges the depth of every pothole in the path of the vehicle and adjusts the suspension to compensate. The result – as this correspondent experienced when he got to sample the technology when it was first unveiled -- is that the most jolting ride across the roughest terrain, become a smooth, glassy glide.
Like so much that has flown from the fertile brains that Dr Bose has gathered around him for half a decade, electronic car suspension seems like a pricey idea, ahead of its time. The closest that one has seen, of commercial realization, is the 'Bose Ride', a dramatically shock-and-vibration-proof seat for long haul truck drivers, that became available earlier this year. It took 24 years to perfect the Bose electronic suspension – and Dr Bose is a patient man. He is prepared to wait till the world demands that his technology for a jolt-free drive is in every passenger vehicle.
It may not happen in his lifetime. The 1.1billion dollar corporation is almost wholly owned by Amar Bose – he has resisted all suggestions to go public – lest it limit his ability to plough almost all profits back into research within the company. His daughter Maiya, is a medical practitioner specializing in the nervous system; His son Vanu, an inventor in his own right, has set up Vanu Inc., a company that has specialised in wireless networking and holds key patents in software-based radio. His multi-radio a technology has fuelled almost all the leading Indian mobile providers. They have their own careers. This is not your typical ‘khandaani’ business. Dr Bose told “Discover” magazine a few years ago, that he is setting up a not-for-profit organization for education and would transfer all his holdings in Bose Inc to the entity which will then run the corporation. He crossed 81 on November 2.
In the 1920s, Bose’s father came to the US, from India, a revolutionary fleeing from the colonial British administration – and continuing the fight for the motherland, from his new home. From an American mother, Amar Bose, imbibed the best of both cultures -- and today his quintessential Indian surname is the world’s most respected brand for great audio. It is a revolution -- albeit of a technological kind, that Amar Bose continues to keep alive from the commanding heights of Framingham.  Nov 15 2010

A shortened version of this story appears in the current ( Nov 21 2010) issue of The Week Magazine: http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?sectionName=Business&contentId=8246635&programId=1073754899&pageTypeId=1073754893&contentType=EDITORIAL&BV_ID=@@@