Dr. Amar Gopal Bose was born in 1929 in Philadelphia to a Bengali father (Noni Gopal Bose) and a U.S.-born mother of English and German ancestry (Charlotte). Amar Bose graduated with a PhD in electrical engineering in 1956 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and celebrated by buying himself a new hi-fi stereo system. But the sound quality disappointed him and he was encouraged to research acoustics at MIT in his spare time. Dr. Bose launched Bose Corporation in 1964. By day, he and his two employees develop power-regulating systems for the military and other government agencies. By night, they explored acoustics and speaker design.

Through a relationship with an audio retailer in Bad Homburg, Germany, Bose began selling products outside the U.S. for the first time in 1972. In 1986, two of Bose’s active noise-reducing headsets preserve the hearing of pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager on their record-breaking, non-stop, around-the-world voyager flight. Dr. Bose and Dr. William R. Short won the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation’s Inventor of the Year Award in 1987 for a loudspeaker system employing a folded acoustic waveguide.