Eugene Lafont - The Indian Association For The Cultivation of Science

The Indian Association For The Cultivation of Science

With the financial support of philanthropist Mahendra Lal Sircar, whose friend he was since 1869, Lafont founded in 1876 the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science. The first aim of the association was to disseminate scientific knowledge and keep the general public abreast with the latest scientific progresses. From its early days the Thursday evening lectures of Eugene Lafont were one of the Association’s main activities. Later it developed into a center of research which supported, among others, the spectrographic investigations of C.V. Raman (1930 Nobel Prize in Physics) and of K.S. Krishnan.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) was another student, and later friend, of Lafont. When Bose discovered the ‘wireless telegraphy’ (at the source of radiophonic inventions) it is Lafont who made in Calcutta (1897) a public demonstration of this discovery. For Lafont there was no doubt that Bose had preceded the Italian Guglielmo Marconi in this discovery. He never failed to give due credit to his former student.

In fact Lafont was more of a genial pedagogue than a research scholar or inventor. His competence and multifarious activities gave him a place in the University of Calcutta of which he was a Senate member for many years. Thanks to him the importance of the study of science in the University was acknowledged: he prepared the science syllabus and in 1903 obtained from the ‘Indian Universities Commission’ more substantial means for the setting up of laboratories and the improvement of the science courses. In 1908, a few months before his death, he received a Doctorate in Sciences Honoris Causa from the University of Calcutta.