Alen Buncer: Entrepreneur

Table of Contents

Introduction - pg. 3

Early Life - pg. 5

Education and Career - pg. 7

The Founding of Bose - pg. 8

Work Begins - pg. 10

Teaching Career - pg. 16

Personal Life and Death - pg. 17

About the Author - pg. 19

Sources - pg. 20

Introduction

Have you ever bought something which disappointed you, and you felt that you could do better? Did you fabricate a home-made version of what you wanted? Did it work?

While there isn't any shame in not remedying the solution yourself, you can benefit greatly from it. You could learn all sorts of things that you wouldn't have otherwise.
more.

Amar Bose is one man who did just that, but created an entire product brand out of it! He saw that the current audio products were lacking in quality, while still having high prices. He didn’t want others to also be ripped off like he had been, so he set out to create a speaker to surpass the others on the market in every way.

It wasn’t easy though, it took years of hard work, research, funding, and prototyping before he created his first product. Amar could have stopped there, but he pressed on, expanding his line of products to fit more needs. Not just the home audio industry, but aviation, military, automotive, and more. He transformed a disappointment into a $4B company.

Early Life and Career

Amar Bose was born on November 2nd, 1929, to Noni Gopal Bose, and Charlotte Bose, and is the founder of the American audio products company, Bose.

His father was of Bengali-Indian lineage. He was a revolutionary freedom fighter who immigrated to the United States to seek refuge from punishment by the British Raj. Amar's mother was an American with a mixed French-German family who worked as a school teacher.

Bose's childhood was spent in Philadelphia and he attended Abington Senior High School. At a young age, he displayed his keen abilities to repair electronics in a small after-school. One instance where he was shown the amazing things electronics could do was on a Boy Scouts trip. Someone had brought along a hobby radio kit and showed him how to set it up.

When he was 13, Bose started a radio repair service in his family’s home. He put up signs in all of his father's hardware stores emblazoned with, "We repair radios." People came and dropped off their radios and Bose would fix them. He created an agreement with his father that if his grades stayed good, Bose could skip school on Friday, and his father would write an excuse that Amar had a headache or something of the sort. Even though the teachers all knew this, they let it slide and would ask Bose every Monday, "How many radios did you fix, Bose?"

Education and Career

After he graduated high school, Bose entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with all of the practical knowledge he gained from fixing radios. During his study at MIT, he spent a year in the Netherlands working in a NV Philips Electronics research lab, and another year as a researcher in India, all paid for with the Fulbright Scholarship.

Amar graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. and was soon offered a job as a professor, which he held for 45 years.

The Founding of Bose

After he graduated, he bought a "professional" speaker set after lengthy research and comparing brands and their components. But when he took one home and gave it a listen, something felt off. Bose had a passion for sound and was a perceptive violinist, so he knew for sure it was a fault of the speaker.

Bose began studying psychoacoustics, the study of how sound is perceived. He saw that other speakers had specifications that only measured how they made music sound, not how human ears would hear them. In his study, Amar discovered that 80% of all sound is heard indirectly, meaning that those sound waves have bounced off other surfaces before reaching the ear. Current speakers created their sounds in a vacuum, creating slightly fake-sounding audio.