Amar Bose, inventor of Bose audio systems, dead

Amar G. Bose, the visionary Indian-American engineer and inventor, famous for making high-quality Bose audio systems bearing his name and speakers for home users, auditoriums and automobiles, is dead.

The billionaire entrepreneur and founder and chairman of the privately held Bose Corporation, died at his home in Wayland, Massachusetts, Friday, The New York Times reported. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by his son, Dr Vanu G. Bose.

As company, Bose focused relentlessly on acoustic engineering innovation. His speakers, though expensive, earned a reputation for bringing concert-hall-quality audio into the home, the Times said.

Though his first speakers fell short of expectations, Bose kept at it. In 1968, he introduced the Bose 901 Direct/Reflecting speaker system, which became a best seller for more than 25 years and firmly entrenched Bose, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, as a leader in a highly competitive audio components marketplace.

Later inventions included the popular Bose Wave radio and the Bose noise-cancelling headphones, which were so effective they were adopted by the military and commercial pilots, according to the Times.

Bose's devotion to research was matched by his passion for teaching. Having earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s, Bose returned from a Fulbright scholarship at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi and joined the MIT faculty in 1956.

Amar Gopal Bose was born Nov 2, 1929, in Philadelphia. His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali freedom fighter who was studying physics at Calcutta University when he was arrested and imprisoned for his opposition to British rule in India.

He escaped and fled to the US in 1920, where he married an American schoolteacher.

At age 13, Bose began repairing radio sets for pocket money for repair shops in Philadelphia. During World War II, when his father's import business struggled, Bose's electronics repairs helped support the family, the Times said.

Bose and his ex-wife, Prema, had two children, Vanu, now the head of his own company, Vanu Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Maya Bose, who survive him, as does his second wife, Ursula, and one grandchild.