Under the glare of a thousand suns-the pioneering works of Sir J.C. Bose

The origin of solid-state diode detectors of wireless waves has been traced to Sir J.C. Bose´s pioneering millimeter-wave propagation experiments with certain polarizing crystals during 1896-1898. His seminal paper published in the January 1897 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society is reproduced in this issue to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the invention of the solid-state diode detector. The world´s first patent on the solid-state diode detector invented by Bose and taken out in the United States, is also reproduced in full in this issue. Bose´s further pioneering work with diode detectors, then known as “self-restoring coherers”, is discussed in particular his invention of the “iron-mercury-iron contact with a telephone” detector that received the first transatlantic wireless signal of Marconi on December 12, 1901