Amar Bose: The 901 Speaker, a Jumping Car and a Gift of Shares to MIT

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In 1956, MIT engineer Amar Bose bought the audio system with the best published specifications and hated how it sounded. He concluded that frequency response and distortion figures ignored the room and the human ear, since most of what a concert audience hears is reflected sound. With backing from his MIT thesis advisor Y.W. Lee, he founded his company in Massachusetts in 1964. Its first product, the 1966 corner-mounted 2201 with 22 speakers, was discontinued the same year. His 1968 paper rejected numerical test data for judging sound, and that year's 901, with eight of nine drivers facing the wall, stayed in production until 2016.

Bose refused to publish traditional specifications, and his company grew litigious. In 1981 he sued Consumer Reports for libel over a review saying the sound tended to wander about the room. The case lasted 14 years and reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which found no proof of actual malice. His researchers built aviation noise cancellation in 1989, debunked cold fusion claims in 1991 by recreating the experiment, and spent more than 20 years and $100 million on an electromagnetic car suspension whose prototype could leap obstacles. In 2011 he gave most of the company's non-voting shares to MIT, and he died in 2013 at 83.

• Noise-canceling headphones for airline passengers followed by 2000, using destructive interference to cancel engine noise.
• The suspension work became the Bose Ride truck seat in 2010, built to spare long-haul drivers from road vibration.
• Over a trademark on ".2," Thiel Audio had to rename its CS2.2 speaker CS2 2, then released a 2.3 model.
• Bose also sued Harman International over speaker port shapes and Beats Electronics over noise-cancellation patents.
• MIT can never sell the donated shares and has no role in running the company, which keeps it privately held.