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The name of Amar Bose has become synonymous with hi-fidelity sound. But Project Sound
is something completely different. The 24-year-long secret project has developed a
revolutionary auto suspension system that offers a magic carpet ride, thanks to some dense
mathematical research and use of electromagnetics. Siliconeer presents a report on Bose’s
latest breakthrough that has experts spellbound and reflects on its progenitor Amar Bose,
the amazing septuagenarian wunderkind.
Entrepreneur and
engineering whiz Amar
Bose can at last look
back with a pleasing
sense of vindication at
24 years of research
on a revolutionary
auto suspension
system which seemed
like a pipedream when
he began. Here’s what
Automobile magazine
has to say about his
latest scientific
breakthrough: “We
have just returned
from The Mountain
(aka Bose Corporation
headquarters in
Framingham,
Massachusetts) where
we witnessed the first mega-breakthrough in car suspensions since the gas-pressurized
shock. Is that hyperbolic enough for you?”
Supplanting almost 100 years of traditional spring-and-shock-absorber suspension systems,
this new system from Bose uses electromagnetic motors in place of traditional shocks.
An Automobile magazine critic describes his experience: “To witness the miracle, we were
strapped into a retrofitted Lexus LS400 perched atop a Bose-designed ride simulator (itself
an engineering tour de force that will most likely replace the towering three-story edifices
currently used by car companies around the world). The initial experience programmed into
the simulator emulated a terribly choppy road with a whole lot of high frequency energy
‘exciting’ the wheels. Butts wiggled and stomachs hopped up and down. It was a buckboard.
A martini shaker. The research engineers working the controls were just a little too jolly
watching the journalists shaken, not stirred.
“Next, in Bose mode, we attacked the same horrid road, but inside the passenger
compartment, we were sailing along on a cruise ship. The teensiest of cradle rock. “Looking
at a mirror on an adjacent wall of the garage, we could see our LS400’s tires chattering and
bashing along, as if they belonged to another car, not the one in which we were blissfully
rocking along. It was mind-boggling, unbelievably astonishing, no less than earth
shattering.”
There you have it. An amazing technological breakthrough that is remarkable not just for its
intrinsic value, but also because of the way it was done: 24 years of faith in innovation and
research. In today’s age of tight-fisted bean counting executives with one eye constantly on
stock prices, how the on earth is it possible?
For the answer you have to look at one man—a trailblazing septuagenarian who at a very
frisky 75 still manages to have the insatiable curiosity of a toddler.
Throughout his life, Amar Gopal Bose has had the avid curiosity of a child, the tenacity to
follow it through, and the gumption to flout conventional thinking.
Amar Bose (c) and Y.W. Lee, one of his mentors (far left),
with famed MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener at the
university’s Research Laboratory of Electronics in 1955.
He was a legendary MIT professor with a cult following, and Bose Corporation, a company
he built from scratch, has made breakthroughs across a mind-boggling range of fields—
acoustics, aviation, defense, nuclear physics, you name it.
By the time he was 13, he could fix radios, and when his father’s business went belly-up
during World War II, young Amar helped support the family by fixing radios after school.
At his alma mater MIT, when he was hired to teach network theory, he threw away the
syllabus and confronted his students with nine blackboards. He urged students to ask tough
questions, expected section leaders to think out loud to illustrate the problem-solving
process, abolished exam time limits and allowed open books.
His classes developed a cult following. One was described as Life 101. Many classes drew
mathematicians, physicists, biologists.
William H. Brody, now the president of Johns Hopkins University, says of him: “He would
walk into a lecture to 350 students, and you could hear a pin drop. He commanded a lot of
respect, because of the force of his intellect and his total dedication to the students. His
class gave me the courage to tackle high-risk problems; it equipped me with the problem-
solving skills I needed to be successful in several careers. Amar Bose taught me how to
think.”
At the end of the day it’s Bose’s way of thinking that remains such a unique gift: Simply put,
it is just a wondrously dogged courage to chase an idea to its very limit. Bose Corporation
may have a billion-dollar turnover, but Bose says he started the company to chase ideas,
not make money. And he kept his company private so he could do that.
“I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs,” he told Popular
Science magazine. “But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so
that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.”
So number crunchers’ myopic obsession with the bottom line was out, a commitment to
pure research was in. There have been instances where Bose has allowed a project to
continue even when he thought it may not succeed.
In 1983 engineering graduate student Ken Jacob enrolled in Bose’s acoustics class during his
final semester at MIT. Jacob planned to design sound for Broadway productions. “Within 20
minutes of the start of that first lecture,” Jacob said, “all my plans had changed. Professor
Bose connected everything I had learned and put all the pieces together. I said, I’ve got to
work for this guy.’”
Jacob was true to his word. He became director and chief engineer of Bose’s Live Music
Technology Group. In 1994 he unveiled the Bose Auditioner program, a software tool that
allows acoustic engineers to hear precisely what a proposed audio system will sound like
from any seat in a large venue even before building construction begins.
The Bose suspension front corner
module
On the day that Jacob unveiled the project, Bose admitted that he hadn’t expected it to
succeed. “He let me work on that with a team of five engineers for 10 years—most of the
time thinking that it was impossible,” Jacob says, shaking his head in disbelief.
Bose says it’s the principle of allowing bright minds to search for answers that was more
important to him. “I thought the computational power wouldn’t be there,” he says. “But the
problem was tough enough and the team was talented enough that I thought their research
would yield something good.” The funny thing was that Bose was proved wrong: The
program works today.
The program has been used to design public address systems at the Staples Center in Los
Angeles, the Sistine Chapel, and even Masjid al-Haram, the grand mosque at Mecca, a
challenging environment, full of reverberating marble, with a history of failed audio
solutions.
Popular Science, in a long, admiring essay, sums it up best about the merit of Amar Bose’s
mindset and contribution.
“The value of Amar Bose—and by extension, his company—isn’t so much in the things he
has invented, but in the sense of possibility he inspires,” the magazine wrote. “Bose reminds
us that we could all afford to be much more skyward-looking, far-fetched and curious, and
that we could all believe more strongly in our own potential to create.”