Boss Bose!

Did you know that Amar Bose is over 75-years old?
Did you know that his middle-name is Gopal?
Did you know that Bose Corp. is a $ 1.7 billion company – that’s privately held?
Did you know that the Bose Corporation’s facility located in Framingham, Massachusetts is called ‘The Mountain’?
Did you know that Bose began research on automobile suspension design in 1980, and has developed a radical new suspension based on advanced electromagnetics? That’s 26-years of research!

I answered ‘no’ to all of the above! And was completely mind-boggled to learn about the Bose Suspension, code-named Project Sound, which I got over e-mail from my alumni group! And this has happened almost 2-years ago!

The premise was simple, as Automobile magazine put it: “Develop a suspension system that would offer the magic carpet ride of a fine luxury automobile, yet provide the crisp handling of a high-performance sports car.” Easier said than done. Luxury automakers like Lotus, Infiniti and Mercedes-Benz have tried and failed.

For Bose, the search began with a question he asked himself several decades ago. “I wondered,” he told Popular Science magazine, “what a car suspension could do without hardware constraints, if you could have any force you wanted, at any time, between the body and the wheel.”

In 1980 he decided to work on it. As is his wont, he ignored the 100-year-old beaten track of automakers who had perfected fluid-based suspension hardware. He threw away the hardware model, and along with it the limitations.

A shock absorber can only absorb energy. Fluid inertia makes hydraulic systems too sluggish.
Bose focused on figuring out mathematically what kind of performance was theoretically possible. Five years of mathematical analysis revealed a tremendous performance gap. There was no way any adjustments to existing shock-absorber technology could close it. So Bose engineers focused on an electromagnetic solution. All they needed was four things: (a) high-efficiency, high-power linear motors and (b) amplifiers, (c) extremely complex control algorithms to stabilize the motors and (d) superfast microcomputers to run the system. So what if none of this stuff existed? Bose decided to tackle the first three and hope the industry came up with the fourth.

Read all about it on the Bose Corp. web-site and a Wired.com article. And for more on the man behind the company, here’s a wonderful article in Popular Science:

“I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs,” he [Bose] tells me.“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.”

And this:
“The future,” Bose famously told his students, “isn’t in solving the problems to which we already know the answers. It’s in learning how to work through the problems you’ll experience in life, in any subject.”

For some reason, the rest of the pages of the Pop-Sci article give a page error; click on the Print Article to read the full story.