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.
Read more about this topic: Eugene Lafont
Famous quotes containing the words indian, association, cultivation and/or science:
“Well, that’s a nice social problem—an Indian in the family.”
—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)
“The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.”
—Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950)
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)