Description

Amar Bose hated the new loudspeaker he had just purchased. The engineering specifications were excellent, so why, he wondered, was the sound reproduction so inferior? Bose was a young superstar at MIT. He had earned his SB and SM degree in 1952 and was quickly snapped up by the new Research Laboratory for Electronics, working for professors Ernst Guillemin, Yuk Wing Lee, and Norbert Weiner. In the spring of 1956, Bose was finishing his doctoral degree and getting ready to leave for India on a Fullbright fellowship, but he had become obsessed with speaker sound and started using RLE equipment to test commercial speakers. While in India, he taught statistics but spent all his evening studying acoustics.

He returned to MIT in 1957 and continued the study of acoustic reproduction. In order to process the volume of data generated from Bose's experiments, Thomas Stockham used the TX-2 computer at Lincoln Labs to develop new practical and theoretical work in digital signal processing. Although his original intention was to teach only for a few years before going into industry, Bose remained at MIT from 1957 until 2001, consistently winning awards for teaching. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bose patented a variety of discoveries, including the assembly of 22 speakers into an eighth of a sphere, allowing a single unit to produce both high and low frequencies which would interact with the reflective surfaces of a room and give the impression that the source was a sphere in the room's center.

In 1964 Bose formed Bose Corporation with his undergraduate roommate Chuck Hieken SB/SM '51, his student Sherwin Greenblatt (SB '62, SM '64), and Professor Lee. Bose Corporation remains a private company, which allowed it to focus on long-term research projects without the pressure of shareholders demanding immediate results. In 2011 he continued a legacy of supporting MIT by donating the majority of the stock of Bose Corporation in nonvoting shares to the Institute.