Alen Buncer: Entrepreneur 

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He wanted to recreate the sound of a concert hall, where sound waves are free to echo throughout the cavernous walls as they please. To gather funding for his new company, Bose turned to his former MIT advisor, Dr. Y. W. Lee. Bose gathered a faculty of professionals to begin revolutionizing the audio industry.

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.

Bose and his team of researchers spent their days filling out their government forms, and nights studying acoustics and sound equipment. They measured the walls and recorded sounds in the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood Music Center. To get an idea of how live music would be perceived by a person, they fit a dummy with microphones attached to the ears and positioned it in different locations in the concert hall. After a year of hard work, the first speaker they made, named the 2201, was shaped like an ⅛ of a sphere so it could be placed into a corner of a room. It projected sounds in various directions, bouncing them off the walls and floor of a room. The effect it was supposed to produce was a “pulsating sphere” in the room. But alas, it was a complete failure. The design was at fault because it required two perfect corners in the room, which not many people had. Bose took a big hit from this failure, the company had used the majority of its government funds to hire a marketing advisor, who told them they would sell about $2 million worth of speakers in the first year. They only sold about 30 pairs.

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

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.

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.

Bose knew that to make people buy his speakers instead of the more well-known ones, he must first demonstrate that his were superior. They first built a small computer, and when it was hooked to a 901 speaker, it would play a 7½-minute demonstration of the speaker’s sound. He performed this to several of the most influential and respected journalists in the small world of high-fidelity audio magazines. Soon, three rapturous reviews from three major publications were printed in magazines, jumpstarting the 901's sales. The 901 raised the standards of speaker quality and was the whole industry’s best-selling speaker for more than two decades!

As a teacher, Bose was very well liked for being straightforward and creative. His lectures were lively and interesting, along with his generous personality. He was well known for giving out ice cream during class. He still was a harsh teacher, and his exams were very often given unlimited time, some lasting up to 10 hours! MIT even gives out two awards in his honor for exemplary teachers. These are “The Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching” and “Junior Bose Award”. In thanks to his old school, Bose gave a majority of non-marketable shares of the Bose Corporation to MIT for the purpose of advancing research and can never be sold.

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.

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?"

Bose and his team of researchers spent their days filling out their government forms, and nights studying acoustics and sound equipment. They measured the walls and recorded sounds in the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood Music Center. To get an idea of how live music would be perceived by a person, they fit a dummy with microphones attached to the ears and positioned it in different locations in the concert hall.

After a year of hard work, the first speaker they made, named the 2201, was shaped like an ⅛ of a sphere so it could be placed into a corner of a room. It projected sounds in various directions, bouncing them off the walls and floor of a room. The effect it was supposed to produce was a “pulsating sphere” in the room. But alas, it was a complete failure. The design was at fault because it required two perfect corners in the room, which not many people had. Bose took a big hit from this failure, the company had used the majority of its government funds to hire a marketing advisor, who told them they would sell about $2 million worth of speakers in the first year. They only sold about 30 pairs.

Samuel Fong enjoys reading, drawing, playing and developing video games. He has a taste for everything old and antique, and finds them much more interesting then their contemporary counterparts.  He lives in Washington State and is 15 years old.

Bose married Prema Bose but they later divorced. They had two children, Vanu and Maya Bose. Bose also had one grandchild, Kamala Bose. Vanu Bose&nbsp;was the founder and CEO of Vanu Inc., a&nbsp;software-defined radio&nbsp;technology company. Despite not practicing any religion, Bose would meditate for a short while before each day.

In 2007, Amar Bose was listed in&nbsp;Forbes 400&nbsp;with a net worth of $1.8 billion, the 271st richest man in the world. Despite dropping off the list in 2009, Bose returned to the list in 2011, with a net worth of $1.0 billion. He received many awards and honors in his lifetime and after his death, such as being an honorary member of the Audio Engineering Society, being listed at ninth place on the MIT150 list, and was awarded the "Beryllium Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2014.

But Bose didn't give up! Their engineers kept tinkering until they came up with the 901. This new speaker borrowed most principles from the 2201, but instead of emitting sound directly at the listener, it bounced its sound off the walls surrounding it. At the time, respected brands' loudspeakers only had forward-facing transducers, while the 901 had eight backwards-facing and one forwards-facing transducer.

Bose was the advisor to MIT professor&nbsp;Alan V. Oppenheim,&nbsp;reputed for his studies and books on digital signal processing. Oppenheim wrote one of his books in honor of Bose, one excerpt quoting: "What I learned from him about teaching, research, and life over the many decades of our relationship affected me in ways too numerous to describe. He set the highest standards in everything that he did, and his accomplishments as a teacher, an inventor, and an entrepreneur are legendary." Sadly, Amar Bose died of natural causes at the age of 83 at his home in Massachusetts, but his legacy lives on in the form of his impact on audio technology on every level.

"No one ever won a chess game by betting on each move. Sometimes you have to move backwards to get a step forward." -Amar Bose

Being that he privately held most of the company, Bose gave himself the freedom to funnel all of the company’s profits back into research, producing numerous firsts in the field of audio. The first noise-canceling headphones were fueled by $50 million and more than a decade of research, and even some in the company wanted to cancel the whole venture. The technology not only produced the Quiet Comfort line of noise-canceling headphones, but a highly successful products for professional pilots and NFL coaches. The company also worked on the first audio system custom-built for the cabin of a production car, the 1983 Cadillac Seville. Today, many auto brands have factory-installed sound systems, with complex speaker arrangements.

https://www.bose.com/en_us/better_with_bose/dream_ and_reach.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/24/how-amar-bose-used-research-to-build-better-speakers.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Bose https://www.famousinventors.org/amar-bose https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/amar-bose

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