Bernd Brunner

The Ocean at Home

An Illustrated History of the Aquarium

Princeton Architectural Press, New York

First published in English in 2005 by
Princeton Architectural Press
37 East Seventh Street
New York, New York 10003

For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657

Visit our website at www.papress.com

First published in German in 2003 by transit Buchverlag

Copyright © 2003 transit Buchverlag
08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition
Printed and bound in China

For the present edition both text and illustrations of the original
German version have been considerably expanded and adjusted.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

without written permission from the publisher, except in the
context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to
identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected
in subsequent editions.

For Princeton Architectural Press:

Project editor: Nicola Bednarek
Copy editor: Scott Tennent
Layout: Linda Lee, based on the design by Gudrun Fröba, transit
Buchverlag
Translation: Ashley Marc Slapp

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Janet Behning, Megan Carey,

Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Clare
Jacobson, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee,
Katharine Myers, Molly Nash Rouzie, Lauren Nelson, Jane
Sheinman, Scott Tennent, Jennifer Thompson, Joseph Weston,
and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press
—Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brunner, Bernd, 1964–

[Wie das Meer nach Hause kam. English]
The ocean at home : an illustrated history of the aquarium /
Bernd Brunner.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56898-502-9 (alk. paper)
1. Aquariums—History. I. Title.

SF457.3.B78 2005
639.34’2—dc22
2004027647
 Contents

7 D ive In 7

1 1 The F irst See d 9

The Secret of the Ocean

1 9The Se cond See d 1 7

Chambers, Cabinets, Cases

23 The Third See d 21

Pet Fish

26 “ Pa ssion a nd D iligence” 25
Pioneers

39 “A Strong, Intensive D esire” 38

The Propagandist

62From Salt to Fre shwate r Aqu ari u m 59

The Lake in a Glass

78 Arriving in the U nited State s 68

Aquarist Societies and Magazines

87E xotic Sp ecies and Tra nsp or t 78

Diverging Beliefs

99 Fashion Show 8 6
Typology of Parlor Aquariums

1 1 9 “A New Kind of Thea ter” 99

The Large Aquariums

1 2 5The Aqu a riu m a s a D rea m 1 21

1 33 Ap p e ndix 1 33
1 33 Acknowledgments 1 3 3
1 33 Selected Bibliography 1 35
1 33 Illustration Credits 1 3 9
133A Selection of Aquariums and Oceanariums 141
1 33 About the Author 1 43
 “There are ideas that dream.”
—Gaston Bachelard

D ive In

The first-time visitor to an aquarium strolls around

searching and contemplating; you can tell by his facial
expression that he cannot contain his inner excite-
ment. His curiosity is so great that he can hardly enjoy
the moment; I am sorry, but he looks so helpless, as if
he has suddenly found himself among people whose
language he neither speaks nor understands.

It is almost impossible for today’s aquarium visitors

to fully comprehend these words by the German doc-
tor and natural scientist Gustav Jäger, who in 1860
built one of mainland Europe’s first public saltwater
aquariums in Vienna. We should not underestimate
our current knowledge of the submarine world: we
have seen the movies by Jacques Cousteau and his
numerous imitators, tried to find “Nemo,” visited
aquariums from an early age, and might have even
gone snorkeling and diving in the Caribbean or in the
Red Sea.
But in 1850 the picture was very different. Knowl-
edge of the ocean was mainly from hearsay, rarely from
one’s own experience. At a time when one’s image of
the animal kingdom was almost entirely dominated
by land animals, a unique invention known as the
aquarium brought the ocean into the home. People
were confronted with a strange new world filled
with amazing creatures and exciting new life-forms.

­­7
The question of whether sea anemones or corals are
animals or plants must have been a popular debate
amongst the curious visitors to Jäger’s aquarium, who
“visibly struggled and fought with their conventional
beliefs.” Observing visitors to the aquarium, Jäger
noted further:
Occasionally, when the guide happened to be absent,
I have witnessed cases in which educated individuals,
after longer periods of moving from one tank to the
next, walked out and asked the ticket officer angrily:
‘What in heaven’s name am I actually supposed to see
in there?’
The unknown provoked feelings of both curiosity
and apprehension. While visitors were searching for
a new experience, they were also afraid of what they
might discover. They fought it, not willing to believe
or understand what appeared before their eyes. Jäger
had to use all his pedagogical skills to explain the
wondrous life-forms in the tanks. His efforts ulti-
mately paid off, and he was able to observe “how at
first the visitors started to understand, and how this
then gave way to amazement, finally resulting in
warm admiration.”
Today, it is easy to take the aquarium for granted,
but one must wonder how awesome it must have
been 150 years ago to peer through a window into a
truly alien world. How did such an invention come
to be? This fascinating idea of simulating, gazing at,
and observing the exotic world of the ocean in an arti-
ficial environment did not simply develop from one
day to the next, but required a very specific will to
comprehend, as well as the appropriate materials and
techniques. This book attempts to show and exam-
ine the evolution of the aquarium, from the different
historical precursors to today’s public and private dis-
plays, and to give an insight into the mindset of the
scientists, inventors, and obsessive enthusiasts who
recreated the ocean in their homes.

­­8
 Th e First Se e d
The Secret of the Ocean

The aquarium has a lot in common with the menag-

erie, the forerunner of the modern-day zoo. But in
contrast to animals in a zoo, where words like “tame”
and “domesticated” can often be heard, marine crea-
tures are instinctively shy. While the keeping and
displaying of animals from around the globe may ful-
fill a wish to capture a sense of the wild, the invention
and subsequent expansion of the aquarium was born
out of a desire to discover and explore the mysteries
of the ocean. This interest, however, did not emerge
until the eighteenth century; until then the ocean
had been taboo, a place of great fear.
For centuries, scientists inspired by ancient myths
and sailors’ yarns had helped to stoke those fears.
The ocean was considered the source of life but also
a place of ill omen, death, and mayhem—a cursed,
dark world where terrifying monsters lurked, devour-
ing anything in sight.
Over time, however, this bleak picture began to
change. Although nineteenth-century artists still
painted shipwrecks and the fear of drowning was still
common, naturalists and authors showed an increas-
ing interest in the ocean. The coast had also been
embraced as a vacation destination. Reports about
the healing powers of salt water and the fresh ocean

­­9
 breeze helped create new seaside resorts, first in Great
Britain and later in continental Europe and the east-
ern United States. Thanks to the newly completed
railroad systems, these resorts could now be reached
in a matter of hours. This easier access coupled with
the public’s changing perceptions played a major role
in increasing the ocean’s popularity.
While the coasts and surfaces of the oceans were
being explored more and more, the deep sea still kept
its secrets for some time. Attempts to shed light on
the ocean’s murky depths failed for many years due
to technical shortcomings, and research in the early
nineteenth century remained focused on physical
and chemical analyses, such as gauging the water’s
temperature, salt content, and density, as well as
attempts to understand the principles of wave for-
mation. Around 1830 scientific interest in this area
declined, and many researchers turned to other
This construction burgeoning fields such as meteorology and geomag-
made of leather
and metal is netism. Biologists, on the other hand, began head-
one of the first ing out to sea more intensively to collect and study
documented marine life. Invertebrate creatures such as sea anem-
diving helmets,
seventeeth ones, sponges, corals, worms, jellyfish, and crabs were
century particularly fascinating, as these life-forms played an
important role in the development of A forerunner of
modern diving
the theory of evolution. suits at the
Up until the middle of the nine- beginning of
the nineteenth
teenth century, the physique, shape,
century
and appearance of many marine ani-
mals had still been an enigma. The
popular assumption was that nothing
could exist in the cold and dark abyss
of the deep sea. In 1844 an anonymous
author wrote in the book The Ocean: a
Description of the Wonders and Impor-
tant Products of the Sea:
Heavy bodies, which will sink rapidly
from the surface, do at length apparently

­­10
 The crew of the
French corvette
Alecton trying
to catch a giant
squid in 1861

cease to descend long before they have reached the

bottom; the pressure of the water being such as to
cause them to remain at certain depths, varying in pro-
portion to their weights. Thus it is that the plumb line
will not act beyond a certain length, and we have no
means, of course, of extending our inquiries deeper.
The image of a current-free ocean bed led many
to believe that the exchange of nutrition or release of
gases was impossible. In other words, the ocean floor
was thought to be a barren, lifeless place.
Not everyone shared this assumption. The British
botanist, zoologist, and geologist Edward Forbes
wished to explore beyond the depth after which it

­­11
 was believed life could no longer exist, and in 1841, he
had the opportunity to cruise the eastern Mediterra-
nean as the naturalist aboard the naval surveying ship
hms Beacon. Forbes dredged to depths of up to 230
fathoms, or 1,380 feet. The results were rather poor,
but he came up with the hypothesis of eight bands, or
depth zones, in the sea, each having a unique assem-
blage of marine life.
During the 1850s, miles and miles of underwater
telegraph cables were installed, opening unprec-
edented lines of communication between continents.
In 1860 a damaged cable, which had lain between the
Italian island of Sardinia and the Algerian coast for
three years, was fished out of the Mediterranean. This
operation not only brought the remains of the cable
to the surface, but also numerous creatures—from
depths below 1,000 fathoms! Nearly twenty years
after he proposed it, Edward Forbes’s theory was con-
firmed, and the centuries-old perception of a lifeless
deep sea was permanently laid to rest.
Frenzied work was promptly carried out in various
Usage of a countries to develop diving bells—an undertaking
dredger that confronted builders with great problems due to

­­12
the enormous change in pressure underwater. One Diving chamber
such example was the German submarine engineer with lighthouse
by the German
Wilhelm Bauer. In 1866 he submitted a proposal to submarine
construct a propeller-driven submarine diving station engineer
Wilhelm Bauer
whose functional principle was based on an air blad-
der, which had the ability to “dive, climb, hold out,
and incline” perfectly. Sadly, his apparatus, intended
to enable the inspection of telegraph cables and to
serve the pearl and coral industry, was never built.
In the following years, scientists ventured further
out to sea and, with the help of dredgers, set sail for
ever-lower depths. Initially, Great Britain, France,
Germany, and the Scandinavian countries were very
active in pursuing marine life, while the United States
continued to focus on exploring its coasts and ascer-
taining the limits of its own water resources.

­­13
 The now legendary four-year expedition of the
British corvette hms Challenger, led by Sir Charles
Wyville Thomson, started in 1872 and explored 363
locations around the world. The ship set out to inves-
tigate for the first time the conditions of each of the
oceanic basins, and it did indeed navigate through
every one except the Arctic. Its results filling thirty-
eight large volumes, Thom-
son’s expedition laid the
foundations for interdisci-
plinary scientific knowledge
of the deep sea: its life, from
the floating plankton to
the creatures at its depths
(Thomson introduced an
astounding 4,717 new ani-
The British mal species to science); the motions and composition
corvette HMS of the water from the surface to the bottom; and the
Challenger
shape and composition of the ocean floor.
Knowledge about life in the deep sea broadened,
but its interpretation was often accompanied by
ambivalence. In fact, many of the deep-sea creatures
Thomson recorded seemed to confirm the fears of
earlier times, as they often resembled the monsters
that had long populated sailors’ tales. The writer of
biological science, William Marshall, for instance,
wrote in 1888, about the “real pelican eel”:
This strange monster whose shape combines a spoon
and a funnel can do little more than to wriggle along
the ocean bed; it hides in the mud with only its open, The real pelican
eel, a creature
nearly toothless mouth protruding, patiently waiting from the
until a victim escaping from the Scylla of a malicious deep sea
lurking crustacean comes too close to
the Charybdis of this terrible gullet and
falls victim to it.
Gustav Jäger seemed torn between
two minds when noting in the chap-
ter about the “abysses of the ocean”

­­14
of his book Das Leben im Wasser und im Aquarium
(Life in the Water and in the Aquarium) that the crea-
tures caught during deep-sea fishing were not fan-
tastical dragons, octopuses, or sea snakes, but small
and harmless life-forms that preyed on even smaller
creatures which were only visible under a microscope.
Yet, he went on to add the following reservation:
It is still possible that in the end the prophecies of the
myths will come true and gigantic animals will appear
from the depths, [because] the more thorough our
deep-sea research methods become, the more crea-
tures will appear.
The demystification of the deep sea was certainly
received with mixed feelings. In 1893 the foreword
of Johannes Walther’s book Allgemeine Meereskunde
(General Marine Science) asked whether the new
inventions making possible the scientific examina-
tion of the ocean would not destroy its beauty, just as
the invention of the telescope had “torn the soul out
of the sky.” Fifteen years earlier, the French author
Léon Sonrel had become obsessed with the ocean.
His book Le Fond de la Mer (The Ocean Bed) was a
compendium of every imaginable aspect of the sub-
marine world and culminated in a fantasy in which
Paris is completely submerged. The idea of oceanic
construction played on the minds of many non-
fiction authors and novelists in the 1860s: La Mer
(The Ocean) by Jules Michelet, Les Travailleurs de la
Mer (The Workers of the Ocean) by Victor Hugo, and
the fantastic novel Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers
(20,000 Leagues under the Sea) by Jules Verne are
probably the most famous of these.
The ocean began to play a larger role in the popular
consciousness, and people became convinced that
marine exploration was of great importance—both
financially and intellectually—thus enabling scien-
tists to receive support for their costly expeditions.
The former fear of the ocean as a treacherous, cursed,

­­15
lonely place had been replaced by unbridled enthu-
siasm. “The land of promise for the naturalist...was
the bottom of the deep-sea,” wrote Sir Thomson in
his book The Depths of the Sea. Seven years earlier,
the German biologist Matthias Jacob Schleiden had
also stated that the ocean was “no longer a barren
cold place where once in a while a lonely Leviathan
would pass through, [and] only an ignoramus would
still consider it a place of fear.”

­­16
 Th e Se co n d Se e d
Chambers, Cabinets, Cases

During the Renaissance period, cabinets of won-

ders—carefully selected and arranged display cases—
elevated curiosities such as embalmed crocodiles,
fossilized eggs, plants, and numerous other interest-
ing objects to highly coveted symbols of a privileged
audience. Since the fourteenth century, expeditions
to uncharted parts of the world yielded odd marine
objects such as mussels, dried starfish, or sea horses,
and their mysterious meanings occupied the minds
of scientists and collectors alike. The objects were
placed in these cabinets or cases in order to be con-
served, registered, classified, and remembered. The
coral cabinet of the Dutch merchant Levinus Vin-
cent, presented in his 1706 book Wondertooneel der
Nature (Wonder Theater of Nature), was a very fine
example of a collection of maritime objects.
As noted by the science historian Anke te Heesen
in her book The World in a Box, an attempt was made
in the eighteenth century to compress the whole
order of the world onto 468 cardboard cards with
copper engravings, stored in a sixteen-by-twelve-inch
case—essentially, the ultimate cabinet of curiosities.
The case was nobly envisioned as an illustrated ency-
clopedia aimed at educating children and juveniles,
but this gargantuan task to present the macrocosm

­­17
Levinus Vincent’s
coral cabinet

in a small concise form was soon abandoned. While

the cabinet proved ineffective in this endeavor, its
use was eventually envisioned anew—this time, filled
with water.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
more and more people became passionate collectors
of things: the simple pleasure found in the act of col-
lecting something, anything, seemed to be satisfying
enough. One spent time rejoicing at all the different
colors and shapes, whatever the given object of desire.
Though far from scientific analyses, the new obses-
sions sparked by the act of collecting did encourage
many laymen’s thirst for further knowledge.
One fad followed another. “Conchyliomanie,”
an almost fanatic enthusiasm for collecting com-
mon seashells, was an early fad. In 1720 six Dutch

­­18
shell collectors started meeting once a month to
discuss their hobby. They called themselves “Lovers
of Neptune’s Cabinet” and, according to Henry E.
Coomans, their small group was the first concho-
logical society. Around 1750 the keeping of parrots,
canaries, and ornamental poultry became very popu-
lar, particularly among women. The science
historian Emma C. Spary has attempted to
explain this by drawing parallels between
caged birds and the restricted lives of women
bound to their household chores; women and
aristocrats were considered to be “fickle with
an uncontrollable sexual drive, dressed up in bright
colors and always in pursuit of something new.” A few
years later, enthusiasm in Great Britain took hold for
a certain, so-called “tasteful” plant collected along

The passion
of collecting
depicted on
playing cards

­­19
beaches: seaweed. The feather-like plant was washed
in fresh water and then, while still moist, stored in
little boxes. This simple hobby was just the thing for
high-society ladies, who often held the responsibility
of naming the newly discovered species. Collecting
offered an uncontroversial distraction, and the “hunt”
for objects such as shells and seaweed involved no
cruelty. Above all, the collected objects were so beau-
tifully clean and immaculate—a perfect decoration
for the boudoir. Some even arranged corals and sea-
weed as miniature landscapes on paper.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century,
another kind of plant, the fern, became a new collec-
tor’s favorite in Britain. Exotic new species of ferns,
imported from tropical regions, caused the plant to
become a highly coveted status symbol. An increas-
ing number of ferns were brought in, transported in
more or less airtight glass tanks, which were decisive
for the survival of the plants during long journeys.
That plant life could now sustain such journeys was
a tremendous breakthrough. And since scores of col-
lectors were already fascinated by unused treasures
imported from the seaside, it was only a matter of
time before such tanks would transport not plants,
but animals from the deep.

­­20
 Th e Th ird Se e d
Pet Fish

Attempts at observing fish in water-filled containers

close to home have a long history, stretching as far
back as several centuries before the birth of Christ,
when the people of Lykia, a region in the southwest
of modern-day Turkey, played flutes to lure Holy Fish
to the surface in order to “question” them about the
future. Seers observed the fish chasing each other,
disappearing, and suddenly reappearing, and from
this, like the bird interpreters of other cultures, drew
their conclusions. Otto Keller noted in Die Antike
Tierwelt (The Ancient World of Animals) that Pliny
the Elder wrote of people who kept oracular fish,
whose acceptance or rejection of food translated to
a good or ill omen. A marvelous fish pond linked to
rivers and streams is believed to have existed in the
ancient Greek colony of Agrigent in Sicily around
500 bc. Centuries later, during the Roman Empire,
almost all of the coastal villas possessed saltwater
ponds. The Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus gave
an account of the fish ponds belonging to a Jew on
the Etrurian coast: “They were located on a grove,
where the fish were able to play merrily within the
vivariums in the calm waves of the enclosed surf.”
These fish were kept in opaque tanks, often made of
marble, in front of the house. The first fish to enter the

­­21
 interior of a house in imperial Rome
was the sea barbel, a much cherished
and expensive breed. Allegedly, they
were kept in small tanks underneath
the cushions of the guest beds. Around
50 ad, panes of glass were brought to
Rome, Herculanaeum, and Pompeii, to
replace one wall of the marble tanks;
now it was possible to actually see the
hustle and bustle of the fish without
having to guess their schematic move-
ments from above.
By the tenth century ad, goldfish
were already playing a significant role
as pets in China and later became
very popular with the country’s ruling
classes. Emperor Hung Wu estab-
lished a porcelain factory in 1369 that
produced large tubs, decorated with
images of dragons and clouds, for fish
and aquatic plants. The shape of these
tubs changed over the years, first as
half-barrels, then, from 1700 onward,
as hemispherical shapes with rounded
Geisha with sides at the top. Over time, the con-
goldfish bowl, tainers started to look more and more like modern-
Japanese
woodcut print day fish bowls.
by Keisai Eisen Around 1500, the goldfish was exported to the
(1790–1848),
Japanese city of Sakai, near Osaka. But it was not
ca. 1830
for another two hundred years that Japan had its first
professional goldfish breeder: Sato Sanzaemon, from
the Koriyama area. From here, the goldfish culture
spread to all four corners of the country. Woodcut
prints from the early 1800s show elegant courtesans
gazing at miniature globes, giving the impression
that the keeping of fish was one of their favorite
pastimes. Today, Japan is famously known for its mul-
titude of goldfish, bred and differentiated into highly

­­22
 Dorade de la
Chine

complicated genealogical trees, including species

with colorful scales and wildly shaped fins.
The first goldfish is presumed to have appeared in
Europe around 1611, most likely in Portugal. The first
sighting in Great Britain was in 1691. Even as late as
1750, the present of a Dorade de la Chine, given to the
Marquise de Pompadour by the French East India
Company, still caused a great sensation. It was a very
suitable gift, as the Pompadour was a Pisces. The
goldfish became as popular in Europe as the canary,
which had succeeded in spreading throughout the
“whole educated world,” as Ernst Bade wrote in
1894. The goldfish was especially popular in Europe’s
warmer regions: the climates of Italy and the south of
France brought out the fish’s red-gold much sooner
than in Germany, where breeders had to wait an
additional year before the fish aged naturally into
the desired coloration, as Franz Kuhn explained in
Der kleine Goldfischteich (The Small Goldfish Pond).

­­23
By 1770, the keeping of goldfish had become quite
common. In contrast, the goldfish did not reach the
United States until much later, probably around 1850.
The well-known showman Phineas T. Barnum is said
to have brought some examples back from his travels
to Europe in the mid-1800s, and G. F. Hervey noted in
his book The Goldfish that a New York City pet shop
was selling goldfish around 1865. In 1883 the aquar-
ist Hugo Mulertt, an American of German origin,
complimented Admiral Dan Ammen on his efforts to
cultivate the goldfish in the United States—methods
that Mulertt would soon use in his goldfish hatch-
ery in Cincinnati. With his participation in industrial
expositions, his ways of breeding goldfish became
better known and helped to spread the hobby in the
United States as the nineteenth century pressed on.

­­24
 “ Pa ssio n a n d D ilig e n ce”
Pioneers

Even before the arrival of the goldfish in Europe, his-

torical documents show that there had been attempts
to keep other sorts of fish in glass containers. Around
1572 the German astrologer, alchemist, and doctor
Leonhard Thurneysser zum Thurn is said to have
manufactured an odd glass sphere in the core of
which sat a bird while fish swam happily around the
perimeter. A century later, in 1666, Leonhard Baldner
wrote his famous Vogel-, Fisch- und Tierbuch (Bird,
Fish, and Animal Book). A diligent passion for fish-
ing and shooting encouraged Baldner to become a
scientist, and he commissioned an artist to paint
illustrations of all the common marine animals. In
order to observe weather loaches and newts for a
longer period of time, Baldner decided to put them in
large tanks filled with water and sand.
The question of whether these animals could really
be kept far away from the sea, river, or ocean for an
extended period of time remained unanswered, how-
ever. In spite of the popularity and proliferation of pet
fish over the centuries and around the world, it was
still nearly impossible to keep a fish alive for very long
outside its natural habitat. In 1721 the Englishman
Richard Bradley believed that a lack of water move-
ment was the reason that animals could not survive

­­25
Catching turtles,
around 1850

in tanks. He suggested designing and creating small

ponds that would be fed by tidal water, which would
then be kept in motion via two water wheels. Bradley
also came up with the idea of building a small dam
to section off part of a stream and to salt the water
therein. Apparently, he had heard about an ocean tur-
tle that had survived for a long time in this manner.
There is also evidence that in 1790 the Scottish
biologist Sir John Dalyell started keeping marine
animals for observation purposes. Among these
creatures was an anemone (Actinia equina) that he
had brought back from North Berwick in 1827. He
exchanged the water on a daily basis and occasion-
ally fed the creature with small pieces of mussels and

­­26
oysters. If we can believe what the Scottish zoologist
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson wrote in Science and
the Classics, this anemone even outlived Sir Dalyell
by several decades, finally dying in 1887—a full sixty
years after its capture.
In 1797 a 300-page book entitled Naturgeschichte
der Stubenthiere (Natural History of Parlor Animals),
written by the zoologist and scientist Johann Matthäus
Bechstein and illustrated with a pipe-smoking ape,
was published in Gotha, Germany. Besides mammals

Naturgeschichte
der Stubenthiere
(Natural History
of Parlor Animals),
title page

­­27
and insects, the book also included a small chapter
on the knowledge and keeping of fish. Specifically the
chapter dealt with the weather loach and the “gold
carp,” a goldfish that was “partly kept in garden ponds
and basins, and partly in glass or porcelain tanks...
as a feast for the eyes.” In order to study their move-
ments Bechstein suggested using “big glass bowls
with an opening at the top which is wide enough for
the fish to receive oxygen, but narrow enough to stop
them from jumping out,” and further advised that
during the summer the water should be exchanged
twice a week, and during the winter every eight to
fourteen days. According to Bechstein, fish had a very
good sense of hearing and in China every fish bowl
was equipped with a small whistle with which the
fish could be lured to the surface for feeding. The
scientist regarded the weather loach to be just as tal-
ented, and even stated that it could make sounds. It
seemed to behave like a living barometer, becoming
uneasy when rain or thunder were imminent, swim-
ming to the surface even though it normally liked
to keep to the bottom. Provided the weather loach
received fresh water and mud at the prescribed inter-
vals, it would be able to survive for many years in a
large sugar jar filled to approximately one-third with
mud and sand. During the winter it required a heated
room and a place close to a window.
Inspired by the work of Sir Dalyell, the French
scientist Jeannette Power de Villepreux belonged to
a group of scientists that displayed a more explicit Cage á la Power
connection to later saltwater aquariums.
Around 1830, Power carried out research in
Messina, Sicily, on argonauts, also known as
paper nautilus—profoundly odd creatures
possessing a lensless eye that functions
like a pinhole camera. The timid females of
the species (the males are much smaller in
size) would swim in the ocean either alone

­­28
 Paper nautilus

or, as Matthias Jacob Schleiden wrote, “united as

a small group of dames,” but would always
retreat into their shells at the slightest
approach of something unknown or an
intense movement of the waves, before
sinking again deep down into the secure
depths of Neptune’s empire.
Power had special wooden boxes con-
structed in which she kept the animals brought
to her by fishermen or which she had caught her-
self. These boxes—which came to be known as Cages
à la Power—were lowered into the sea and anchored.
Applying a specially constructed mechanism, she
hauled the boxes and glass containers from the water,
making observation easier. Power had set up a labora-
tory in a house directly by the sea, which contained
a wooden box into which salt water was pumped in
and out via rubber hoses—a small but very efficient
circulation system.
Richard Owen, director of the British Museum in
London and also known for coining the term “dinosaur”

­­29
 for prehistoric reptiles, knew of Power’s experiments,
and in 1858 he attributed the invention of the aquarium
to her. Power herself would later express—quite self-
confidently—that she had in fact invented the aquar-
ium. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Ameri-
can feminists viewed Power not only as the inventor
of the aquarium but also as the prime example in a
long line of successful female inventors. An article
in The North American Review from 1883 entitled
“Woman as an Inventor” highlighted Power as “one of
the most eminent naturalists of the century.” A long-
belated—and exceptionally remote—memorial was
granted to her in 1991, when a crater on Venus was
named after her. Power’s claim, however, provoked
objections. As early as 1858, another article, also in
the The North American Review, asserted that Pow-
er’s cages “were merely receptacles suspended in the
waters of the bay to enable her to watch the habits of
marine animals” and that “the plan of maintaining the
balance of nature by means of plants was unknown
to her.”
Wardian case Until this point in time, it was still not clear how,
on a large scale, a self-contained water eco-system
could function, at least over a length of time.
The surgeon Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward had
already discovered in the early 1830s that
delicate plants such as ferns could flour-
ish in nearly airtight glass tanks. The
microclimate, which stabilized itself
inside the tank, allowed the plants to
be more or less oblivious to external
temperature changes and pollutants.
The latter was an important factor for
Ward, who lived in the middle of Lon-
don’s docklands. Additionally, hardly
any new water was required as the evap-
orating water condensed on the glass and
was reabsorbed by the plants. These small

­­30
Another illustration of the Alecton trying
to catch an approximately 4,000-pound
squid—120 miles northeast of Tenerife.
After a three-hour hunt, a rope was thrown
around the squid. The rope caught on
the large rear fins and with one swift
movement cut through the soft body.
The squid submerged and vanished.
Plants of the submarine world

Opposite page:
Submarine landscape

Following page:
Parasitic anemone (Calliactis
parasitica)
hothouses were soon being mass-produced and used
as “miniature gardens” in places where the view out
of one’s window was less than appealing, or by breed-
ers who could not afford their own hothouses. In 1836
Ward suggested using the principle of his tanks for
tropical animals, and in 1841 he filled one with aquatic
plants and toy fish, et voila: it flourished without con-
stantly requiring new water. Concurrent with Ward,
others in Europe were creating similar contraptions:
around 1838 the French zoologist Felix Dujardin was
also said to have owned a saltwater aquarium, though
he did not actually use this term; and in his book A
History of British Sponges and Lithophytes, published
in 1842, a certain Dr. Johnstone mentioned glasses in
which he had kept small corals, a starfish, and mus-
sels for two months.
In 1846 the marine zoologist Anna Thynne, wife of
the Reverend Lord John Thynne, sub-dean of West-
minster Abbey, transported some stone corals from
Torquay on the south coast of England to her London
home in a clay container filled with salt water. She
subsequently placed the animals in two glass bowls
in order to analyze them in greater detail. At first she
exchanged the water in the bowls every second day,
but soon her reserve of salt water was gone. Thynne
decided to reuse the old water after moving it back
and forth in a receptacle for forty-five minutes in front
of an open window (a rather monotonous chore likely
left to her housemaid). This “new,” enriched water
now supplied the corals with sufficient oxygen again.
When Thynne returned from one of her journeys,
her house was a place of uproar and confusion: the
asexual and fissiparous animals had, as is their nature,
reproduced, throwing the servants into a state of
panic. They had tried to stop the animals from repro-
ducing by placing several stones in the bowl, but their
efforts were in vain. A few years later, in 1849, Thynne
also added seaweed and was thus able to maintain

­­35
Corals

her collection of marine life at her London home for

almost three years, a feat that garnered the attention
of many biologists and other people interested in
natural history.
Rebecca Stott, who dealt extensively with Thynne’s
study of madreporas in her book Theatres of Glass,
described Thynne as the creator of the “first balanced
marine aquarium in London.” But others were cred-
ited for the detailed scientific documentation and
further publicizing of these findings. Among them
was Robert Warington, a member of the Chemical
Society in London, who systematically studied the
interaction between underwater animal and plant
organisms and who had possibly heard about Thynne’s
experiments. In May 1849 (at about the same time as
Thynne), after isolated tests with plants in Wardian
cases, Warington experimented with a thirteen-gallon
container, which he filled with spring water, mud,
several stones, two goldfish, a plant called “eelgrass,”
and a few pond or great pond snails as “renovators.”
Warington published his findings about the self-
sufficiency of this biotope in 1850 in a short article
in the Chemical Society’s journal, describing the
combination of previous separate findings: animals

­­36
inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide while plants
do the opposite, absorbing carbon dioxide and, under
the influence of light, releasing oxygen—the prin-
ciple of photosynthesis; as fish eat insects and small
snails, they excrete substances that are also benefi-
cial to plants; additionally, small water snails eat the
parasitic algae that develop in tanks. Warington’s
experiment yielded a perfect equilibrium, an aquatic
perpetuum mobile!
Industrially manufactured glass, an important pre-
condition for the further distribution of transparent
tanks, was now easy to obtain and, after the repeal-
ing of the glass tax in Great Britain in 1845, also less
expensive. At the first World’s Fair in London in 1851,
the Crystal Palace, 1,848 by 454 feet, was the epitome
of industrialized glass-and-steel production. It took
two thousand workers seven months to construct using
pre-manufactured and standardized components.

­­37
 “A St ro n g , In t e n sive D e sire”
The Propagandist

The popularization of observing the interaction between

marine animals and aquatic plants in glass tanks can
be attributed to the Englishman Philip Henry Gosse,
who was the first person to resolutely use the word
“aquarium” for such objects. In his book A Natural-
ist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, published in
1853, the term “vivarium” was used interchangeably
with “marine aquarium,” but one year later the die
was cast for the latter variant in his book The Aquar-
ium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea.
As Gosse stated there, the word should be “neat,
easily pronounced and easily remembered.”
The term “vivarium” was designated for tanks
containing mainly snakes and amphibians;
“aqua vivarium” was a step in the right direc-
tion, but the term was not yet perfect. Gosse
understood “aquarium” as the neutral form of
“aquarius.” He must also have known that to the
old Romans, an aquarium signified only a reservoir
of water and also that botanists had already been
using this term for plant tanks for quite some time.
For him this was not contradictory but a justifiable
linguistic expansion. He affirmed ceremoniously:
Let the word aquarium then be the one selected to
indicate these interesting collections of aquatic animals

­­38
 and plants, distinguishing it as Freshwater Aquarium,
if the contents be fluviatile, or a Marine Aquarium, if
[the contents are saltwater-based].
Gosse was born in 1810 in Poole, in the south
of England, the son of an impoverished traveling min-
iature-painter. As a young man Gosse made his way
across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, where he dealt
with seal and cod fleets in Carbonear harbor. In his
early twenties he bought a copy of the book Essays
on the Microscope at an auction and devoted himself
whole-heartedly to collecting insects; for two years he
documented every insect he could get hold of. Along
with some of his friends, he decided to move to main-
land Canada in hopes of establishing a rural commune
and opening a museum of stuffed birds. After both
ventures failed, Gosse returned to England, where he
found work as a teacher in Hackney until he received
an invitation from the Society for the Promotion of
Christian Knowledge to write An Introduction to
Zoology. In researching his subject, Gosse met sev-
eral other naturalists and began to write articles for
scientific journals. This inspired him to write a book
on the findings of the explorer Sir James Clark Ross,
who since 1818 had traveled throughout the Pacific
and Arctic discovering a wide variety of marine flora
and fauna. In 1844 The Ocean became an unexpected
success for its publisher and was reprinted numer-
ous times over the next forty years. Gosse’s new-
found notoriety led to future opportunities to study
the ocean world, and he left his past dalliances with
entomology and zoology behind. In the fall of 1844
he went to Jamaica—a trip made possible by an avid
seashell collector, who financed Gosse’s journey in
return for additions to his collection. Gosse’s time
in Jamaica resulted in three very successful books,
and the author became an important voice among the
publishing naturalists of the period. Writing became
the autodidact’s livelihood.

­­39
 Upon his return from Jamaica, Gosse became a
devout Christian. Through his wife, Emily Bowes,
he became involved with a sect called the Plymouth
Brethren Movement. Life was then dictated by the
monotony of seemingly endless prayers; reading
novels and poems as well as going to the theater
or singing temporal songs was forbidden, and even
social contacts outside the brotherhood were not
permitted. Gosse strongly believed that Jesus Christ
would return to Earth before his own death. Under
this sense of urgency, he set about to work on several
book projects, all of which dealt with life on the coast.
Gosse could either be found sitting behind his desk or
working outside where, dressed in his black suit, he
fervently poked around in the silt of the tidal shallows
or—even during heavy surf—meticulously examined
the water holes in rocks for any living creature. Gosse
became an authority for everything connected to
coastal fauna. His frequent speeches in London were
always met with acclaim and adoration.

In his book The Aquarium, Gosse described his

observations of coastal life and gave his readers some
instructions on how to build a miniature ocean. A salt-
water aquarium, he asserted, was the perfect way to
get acquainted with the peculiar creatures of the ocean

An excursion
along the English
coast

­­40
without having to descend into the depths using com- Philip Henry
plicated diving equipment. He expressed amusement Gosse on a
rocky beach
about a French zoologist, Henri Milne-Edwards, who
stalked around at the bottom of the Mediterranean
wearing a waterproof suit, special glasses, and an air
pipe in order to take a closer look at the submarine
world. All this was so much easier to achieve, Gosse
proclaimed, in the safe environment of one’s own
four walls!
In his many long-winded “Let us visit the caves of a miniature ocean,
reports about his coastal The gorgeous sea-flowers and worms to behold—
Actinia, rose-finger’d, ever in motion;
excursions Gosse told his
Phyllodoce, liveried in emerald and gold.”
readers that the aquarium —The Aquarium
was the objective, but that
many obstacles still had to be overcome. One’s rela-
tion with nature required a cautious and respectful
approach, for its exploration was, in Gosse’s mind,
a spiritual exercise. For Gosse, religion and natural
science went hand in hand: “it brings us, in some
sense, into the presence of God,” he said. “Or rather
it gives us cognizance of Him, and reveals to us some
of his essential attributes.”
Nowadays, we might associate colorful fish or fan-
and feather-like algae with the aquarium. But Gosse’s

­­41
pioneer aquarium contained an amazing bundle of
marine fauna and flora. Prior to collecting the ani-
mals, it was important to collect the plants, which
were responsible for the oxygen in the tank. For this,
Gosse recommended the day after a full moon or
new moon, as the tide is then as far out as possible
and areas usually covered with water become visible.
Armed with a covered collecting basket, stone and
glass jars, two or three smaller vials, and some hammers
and chisels, he ventured out to the ledges of rock at
the edge of the sea. He was especially drawn to rough
and sharp crevices—those that any intelligent hiker
would try to avoid at all costs—because it was here
that the desired plants tried to hide:
We lift up the hanging mass of olive weed (Fucus) from
the edge, and find the sides of the clefts often fringed
with the most delicate and lovely forms of sea-weed;
such for example, as the winged Delesseria, (D. alata)
which grows in thin, much-cut leaves of the richest
crimson hue, and the feathery Ptilota (P. plumosa) of
a duller red.
The plant had to be removed together with a piece
of the rock on which it grew; only this way did it have
a chance of survival. After skillful chiseling (often
under water), each piece of grass found its temporary
home in a receptacle that had been brought along. It
was even more important to have a suitable transport
container handy when collecting animals. According
to Gosse, a collector should always be watchful and
alert, as strange creatures of various forms and shapes
could appear at any moment.
Upon returning from his seaside excursion, Gosse
would begin the process of transferring his findings
from the temporary tanks into his marine aquarium.
The exterior of Gosse’s aquarium already resembled
the familiar rectangular glass tank with birchwood
beading. It was two feet long, one foot wide, one
foot deep, with the sides and ends consisting of glass

­­42
 The Aquarium,
published by
Philip Henry
Gosse: The
Ancient Wrasse,
title page

panes and the bottom of slate. The panes of glass

were puttied between the birchwood, which was a
tremendous improvement over earlier prototypical
aquariums, as the even glass surfaces did not cause
the optical distortions related to round glass when
observing the tank’s contents. Gosse covered the
bottom of the aquarium with an insulating layer of
clay, pebbles, sand, and, finally, with small pieces of
rock, which formed mini-bridges and overhangs that
gave the swimming creatures shelter. After adding
the plants, Gosse poured twenty gallons of salt water
over the miniature landscape. During the first night,
Gosse would observe the tank by candlelight and see
that numerous tiny shells and micro-organisms were
already bustling around inside.
The real animals were added the following day.
Among the specimens from Gosse’s excursion: one
fifteen-spined stickleback, seven grey mullet, one
black goby, three common periwinkle, one anomia,
two common cockles, two ascidia, two hermit crabs,
four sand shrimp, one prawn, three crown worms,
two thick-horned anemone, and many others. All in
all about one hundred animals found a new home in
the tank. Although the tank could handle even more,
and two or three gallons of salt water per day were
constantly dripping into the aquarium from another
vessel suspended over the tank as “artificial aeration,”

­­43
it dawned on Gosse that the consumption of oxygen
would soon exceed its supply. The first week of his
experiment proved to be successful (apart from one or
two attacks on weaker animals by predatory species).
But three days into the second week a number of
animals died, and the water developed an unpleasant
smell due to those that had died in the sanctuary of
the stones. After thoroughly cleaning the tank, Gosse
carried on with his experiment with the remaining
fauna and flora.

Since there was as yet little possibility for the general

populace to experience many of the creatures Gosse
and others had collected, it fell to Gosse to bring them
to life on the pages of his books. In his descriptions he
concentrated on those animals that best embodied the
mystery of the submarine world. He repeatedly used
analogies to land animals—combining human and ani-
mal forms to create clear pictures in the readers’ minds.
Gosse referred to one creature, with its long silky hair
adorning it like a fur coat, as the “sea mouse,” which
he called “the most gorgeously clad of all the crea-
tures that inhabit the deep.” Carl Linnaeus, the great
taxonomist of biology, who established a new system
for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms, had
referred to it as “Aphrodite” as early as the eighteenth
century. According to Gosse, the “Aphrodite aculata,
reflecting the sun-beams from the depths of the sea,
exhibits as vivid colours as the peacock itself, spread-
ing its jewelled train.” In the aquarium the sea mouse
attracts attention due to its restless movements and
a jet of water, which spurts every twenty-five seconds.
The splendor of its changing colors made it an object
of admiration: red and orange reflections usually
appeared under candlelight, while during the day
they changed to green and blue. Gosse also adored
prawns, which he considered “particularly pleasing
inhabitants of the aquarium”:

­­44
 Aesop shrimp

There is a certain lightness in the slender filiform

appendages of the head, which are continually thrown
into the most graceful curves, that resembles in char-
acter “the light tracery of ropes and spars” so much
admired in a trimly rigged ship.
Elsewhere, Gosse continued:
Their bodies are so pellucid that a lady who was
this moment looking at the tank compared them
to ghosts, and their smooth gliding movements aid
the similitude.
The submarine world is a place where definitions are
loose and guidelines become hazy. As the alter ego of
this world, the aquarium emulates this laxity. Coral,

­­45
 starfish, anemone, jellyfish, sea horse: mineral/dead,
fauna/flora, male/female? These unanswered questions
and blurred concepts become a bundle of mysteri-
ous categories and metamorphoses that take place
according to still unknown laws.
With immense fascination Gosse turned toward
Sea crab and those creatures that build some sort of relation-
small shrimp
ship but can hardly be differentiated as individuals.
The alliance between whelks, hermit-crabs, and sea
anemones is, in Gosse’s view, simply brilliant:
Many persons who know a Whelk as well as possible,
hesitate when they see the familiar shell tenanted, not
by the great black-spotted Mollusk, but by a mongrel
between Crab and Lobster, with stout, red, pinch-
ing claws, and long, jointed, and pointed legs. And
still more mysterious does the thing look, when two
thirds of the shell itself is enclosed in a thick mass of
purple-spotted flesh, through the midst of which the
busy Crab his poking his head and limbs. In truth it
is a strange affair, this threefold alliance of Whelk,
Hermit-crab, and Cloak-anemone.
In fact it is only a relationship between two living
creatures, because only the whelk’s shell remains,
no longer inhabited by the original mollusks.
Gosse defined the crab as “the scavenger of
the sea,” which, like wolves and hyenas,
devoured everything alive or dead. Also
known as animal flowers, polyps, or by its
scientific term “Actinia,” the sea anemone, with
its color-changing tentacles, can often be found sit-
ting on stones on the ocean bed, expanding to great
Her- lengths before shrinking to a tenth of its size. Equally
mit crab in a fascinating, pieces of the creature could break away
Cerite shell and a
seahorse­
and develop into new animals. Due to its flower-like
appearance, the sea anemone was for a long time mis-
takenly considered to be the “missing link” between
plants and animals. The symbiosis of hermit-crab and
sea anemone is—according to Gosse—open for all

­­46
 The symbiosis of
hermit crab and
sea anemone

possible speculation and interpretation: Who is actu-

ally in control? Is it the crab, pulling the anemone
along the ocean bed, striking it with scattered stones?
Or has the sea anemone devoured the shell together
with the crab; and has the crab then managed to find
a way out through the stomach and skin of the sea
anemone? Has the sea anemone released a special
membrane, enabling the crab to have a home suitable
to its needs, but one it will never be able to leave?
What makes the sea anemone search for snail shells
and such close contact to crabs? Why does the sea
anemone die and turn into a foul-smelling mass as
soon as the crab leaves the shell or dies?
With the help of the aquarium, Gosse hoped to
discover the principle of their opposite attraction
and the secret of the apparent melding of bodies
and identities. Observation through the aquarium
glass led to questions of the unsolved relationship
between the “female” sea anemone and “male”
crab; the animals fought and displayed a grotesque,
suspicious analogy to the relationship between man
and woman.
Not until the 1920s and 1930s were biologists
able to offer plausible explanations for this interac-
tion, which is now regarded as the prime example of

­­47
biological symbiosis. As we know today, sea anemo-
nes use their nematocysts to keep octopuses away
from the crab. The sea anemone, on the other hand,
profits from this, gaining a much bigger habitat due
to its host’s movements. Additionally, it can ingest
some of the crab’s prey as its mouth directly faces the
masticatory organs of the crab. This relationship can,
however, end in tragedy: if the hermit-crab can-
not find enough food, it will eat the sea anemone.
Although the mystery of this relationship has been
solved, scientists still have much to study in the sea
anemones, such as the question of its age.

Unfortunately, Gosse’s The Aquarium does not give

detailed information on the actual maintaining of a
working saltwater aquarium. Some passages of the
expansive tome contain a few hidden tips, but it is not
until the final pages that Gosse provides the reader
with information about cleaning the tank and sup-
plying oxygen through the exchange of water. These
pages also mention the unavoidable: the “occasional
death,” which every aquarium owner will have to face
sooner or later:
It will still be needful to exercise a watchful super-
vision of the collection. It must be remembered that
both the animals and plants are not in their natural cir-
cumstances, and that a certain amount of violence is
done to their habits. Death, which spares them not at
the bottom of the sea, will visit them in the Aquarium;
and hence the vessel should be occasionally looked
over, searched, as it were, to see if there be any of the
specimens dead.
Gosse’s book is a bizarre description of a trip to the
sea as well as a small “bible” for the coastal world. He
wanted to register everything in this world, but that
was not all: he wanted to take hold of it, domesticate
it and—against all odds—educate it to be a perma-
nent guest in people’s homes. His aquarium was a

­­48
living museum, an inversion of Noah’s Ark—all species Sea anemones
of marine fauna and flora, safely held amidst a dry
environment. He stubbornly denied the transitory
character of the aquarium; museums, collections,
and the endless, often compulsive classification of
natural species remained his central points of study,
resulting in extreme laboratory experiments on these
forms. Gosse tried to achieve the impossible—to put
life into the “collecting cases” that had been designed
centuries earlier for lifeless objects. The aquarium
comprised things that—at least under the conditions
of Gosse’s day—did not really belong together. At the
time, the prospect of experiencing vivid nature cre-
ated great excitement; the transition from the static
goldfish bowl to colorful collections of enigmatic
aquatic animals and plants in an aquarium was a
natural extension of the trend.

Comparable to the zoological gardens that brought

the animal kingdom to the cities or the botanical
garden hothouses that showcased tropical flora—
living compendiums through which nature lovers and
flâneurs alike could wander—the aquarium encap-
sulated the submarine world into a “see-through”
form—the paradox of an ocean journey within one’s

­­49
own home. The aquarium acts as a mediator between
animal and observer.
Gosse had a way of expressing his enthusiasm in
his books and articles that positively stirred the bour-
geoisie. His numerous lectures on oceanic subjects
always caused a sensation. According to the Victorian
magazine, the Literary Gazette, published in London,
Gosse had “dived into all those decorated palaces
which had unassertively been kept under lock and
key by old Neptune for such a long time”; another
chronicler wrote that “all the world wanted to possess
an aquarium to verify his assertions and repeat his
experiments”; the magazine Blackwoods even recom-
mended that children should not see the book, other-
wise there would be no peace and quiet in the house
until the children were finally allowed to have an
aquarium. But the burgeoning fad needed more than
Gosse’s contagious enthusiasm to be a success: it
also had to please the eye. High-quality illustrations,
which were quite rare at the time, therefore played an
important role in the book’s success. The colorfulness
of sea creatures was still largely unknown, but Gosse
was not unacquainted with the drawing and printing
techniques of the period. Thanks to the skills of his
father, Gosse was able to produce the illustrations for
the book himself. The Aquarium was more than a cul-
tural sensation: it was also a financial success, with
earnings of about 805 pounds (roughly 60,000 U.S.
dollars today). A year later, the smaller Handbook to
the Marine Aquarium was published for those who
had not been able to afford the first book.

The collecting of ferns was no longer satisfactory

for the Victorian bourgeoisie. They now turned
their attention toward the exploitation of the coastal
regions and the question of how to transport the ani-
mals acquired on such expeditions. Women from the
era in particular, known for their glowing enthusiasm

­­50
­­51
Ocean crabs

Previous page:
Plumose anemone

­­52
 Ocean annelids

Following page:
Dragonet fish, monkfish and
seaweed (underwater along
the Heligoland coastline)

­­53
 Victorian ladies
observing an
aquarium,
around 1860

for nature, dedicated themselves to the coasts. They

swarmed onto the beaches to collect marine animals
while their husbands watched from a safe distance.
Here, the rapidly expanding middle class found a
topic suitable for conversation as well as education.
As Henry D. Butler retrospectively wrote about the
British aquarium mania in his book The Family Aquar-
ium—“The aquarium was on everybody’s lip. The
aquarium rang in everybody’s ear. Morning, noon,
and night, it was nothing but the aquarium.” A few
years later William Alford Lloyd’s shop on Portland
Road in London, quite close to Regent’s Park, experi-
enced a boom. Fifty large tanks and countless smaller
containers held some 15,000 marine specimens. The

­­55
Lloyd’s aquarium
warehouse

emporium sold salt water over the counter by the

pint, quart, or gallon. Aquariums were manufactured
in a nearby factory, and Lloyd employed more than
a dozen people for the purpose of collecting plants
and animals from the coasts and purchasing lots
from amateur collectors. Lloyd’s 125-page catalog,
published in 1858, listed everything to do with the
aquarium. Enthusiasts could find all they required to
satisfy their “strong and intensive desire” for natural
objects. Before the shop opened, people
“It is at once an ornament, a toy,
had to make excursions out to the coast,
a cabinet, a menagerie, a Jardin
des plantes, a Botanico-Zoological and transportation was often expensive
picture, in which every colour has and dangerous, which made the whole
­life; in short ‘a thing of beauty and undertaking quite unappealing. Once
joy forever.’”
—Shirley Hibberd (1856)
Lloyd went into business, aquarium lov-
ers could obtain everything they needed
easily and frequently. Only a specialist dealer, accord-
ing to Lloyd, was really able to select the right ani-
mals and provide the appropriate cleaning methods.
Furthermore, he also supplied what was required to
adequately house the animals on offer. In contrast
to the keeping of domestic animals, there was still
a lot to be learned, so Lloyd also offered a customer
service: aquarium maintenance and the replacement
of occasional losses, though “risks, whether during
transit or for any other reason, were always borne by
the customer.” In order to reduce losses or damages,

­­56
 A collecting
expedition along
the coast

certain measures had to be taken: it was advisable

to choose the nearest railroad station for the journey
and, if possible, to state the exact train and its time
of arrival so that precautions could be carried out
accordingly. Aquariums and salt water were always
transported on freight trains, “perishable goods” on
either very fast trains or passenger trains, and the
more robust animals and plants were sent in small
packages by mail. Title page of
The craze of the 1850s, however, was just that: a Lloyd’s Aquarium
Warehouse,
craze. According to the British social historian David London 1858
Elliston Allen in his fascinating study The Naturalist
in Britain, the wave of nature enthusiasm in the 1850s
was “sloppier, less intelligent, more given to hysteria”
than in the preceding decades. Fads were no longer
restricted to the bourgeoisie, but now expanded to
the middle classes. Only a few years later, “aquarium
mania” was already a thing of the past, at least in
Great Britain. Nine out of ten aquariums had been
either dumped or simply left to their own devices.
In 1860 the journalist and botanist Shirley Hibberd
wrote about the situation in Great Britain:
The “aquarium mania” may be considered as fairly
dead: it died out properly and completely; but the
aquarium remains, and every earnest student of botany
and zoology will prize it as a triumph of art acting as
the handmaid of science. We rarely hear of “aquariums

­­57
 in trouble” now-a-days, because the thousands who set
up aquaria, without the least idea that to be success-
ful they must be managed on philosophical principles,
have long ago given them up as “troublesome.”
Quite often, the individual experience of the par-
lor gave way to the collective experience of the large
public aquariums found in Brighton and other coastal
resorts. An interest for the ocean remained in Great
Britain, but it shifted from the shores to the depths
of the ocean. In spite of the huge costs, those who
could afford it sailed out to sea in the 1860s to hunt
for creatures using a dredger—a net tied between a
rectangular steel frame.
Around this time, in 1859, Charles Darwin
announced his theory about the origin of
species. Later, as Darwin’s theory of evolution
became widely acknowledged, Gosse’s own
theologically based idea of evolution lost more
Typical dredger and more of its credibility among scientists, which
with hemp tassels caused him great pain. He became very melancholic
and abandoned himself to his varying moods, sur-
rounded by his grandchildren, butterflies, orchids—
and his aquarium.

­­58
 From Sa lt to Fre sh wa t e r A qu arium
The Lake in a Glass

Shortly after its publication in Great Britain, The

Aquarium must have landed on the desk of the
German malacologist Emil Adolf Rossmässler. The
son of an engraver, Rossmässler was born in 1806 in
Leipzig and developed an interest in nature at a very
early age. After studying theology, he was princi-
pal of a private school in the state of Thuringia,
in the middle of Germany, before becoming a
professor at the tiny forestry college of Tharandt
in the Erz Mountains in 1830. During this time
he was in frequent contact with the German
natural scientist and explorer Alexander von
Humboldt, the German Academy of Science in Ber-
lin, and the Viennese Cabinet of Natural Objects. Emil Adolf
Rossmässler eventually became a private scholar of Rossmässler

natural science and gave numerous lectures around

the world.
Rossmässler was just one of many popularizers of
the quickly developing field of natural sciences in the
mid-nineteenth century. He knew how to mediate
between academic discourse and the public’s desire
for entertainment, and he played an integral part in
encouraging interest in this subject, against which

­­59
 both the church and the state displayed great reser-
vations. Proponents of the natural sciences set out to
spread the word, earning money by writing articles
in magazines and newspapers, publishing lavishly
illustrated books, and going on lecture tours. Along
with adult education centers and workers’ educa-
tion associations, the aquarium became a means for
Rossmässler to realize his dream of the democratiza-
tion of knowledge and society.

Rossmässler was also a cofounder

“The tyrannical, omnipotent, ungovernable
of the magazine Die Gartenlaube
ocean floods onto our tables as the never-
ending source of joy of our gatherings and (The Garden House), first pub-
of our loneliness. We don’t even have to wetlished in 1853. A magazine for
our feet or sacrifice the usual tribute fromthe “long winter evenings in
our stomach.”
—Die Gartenlaube (The Garden House), 1854
front of the homely fire,” Die
Gartenlaube supplied its read-
ers with images and interpretations from nature and
history, which soon became part of popular knowl-
edge. As early as 1854 two articles were published,
both entitled Der Ocean auf dem Tische (The Ocean
on the Table), dealing with this strange British appa-
ratus known as the aquarium. The articles defined
the aquarium as “an enlarged and scientifically con-
structed goldfish terrine, filled with life-forms from
the depths of the ocean and whose complete, abys-
sal, mysterious richness one could now study on the
table, dressed in a night gown and slippers.” This
was a “tasteful…scientific luxury.” The anonymous
author was optimistic about the contraption’s poten-
tial, predicting that “in the course of time, the depths
of the ocean, transparent upon our tables, will tell us
many a strange tale about nature.”
In 1856 another article appeared in Die Garten-
laube, entitled Der See im Glase (The Lake in a
Glass). This time Rossmässler was concentrating on
a different type of aquarium—one filled with fresh
water. In contrast to the saltwater aquarium, which

­­60
 The first
illustration of
a freshwater
aquarium in Die
Gartenlaube

was popular in British coastal towns, the freshwater

aquarium was of special interest to people further
away from the sea. The accompanying illustration was
of a large glass bowl with a wide opening at the top
and a few small snails and vigorously growing plants at
the bottom. This scene was being watched by a young
girl sitting comfortably on a sofa nearby. Rossmässler
wrote that he almost threw up his hands in despair
after reading Gosse’s book. After all, as a natural scien-
tist, Rossmässler had kept marine animals and aquatic
plants in large glasses for several years, but he had
not applied any scientific sense to them. According
to Rossmässler, foreign plants should only be allowed
when domestic types were not sufficient. Gosse’s
use of these plants, in Rossmässler’s estimation, was
unnecessary, since the unique forms of most domestic
plants would appear foreign to readers anyway.

­­61
 Various types of plants determined the freshwater
aquarium. It was supposed to be a “small botanical
garden island” with very little space for a few small
fish. Indeed, the article listed and described over fifty
different species of plants, while the only recom-
mended animals were the marsh snail, the pond snail,
the freshwater pearl mussel, the goldfish and, if neces-
sary, the weather loach or pond-breeding salamander.
An aquarium was not the place for “predatory fish”
such as the trout, pike, or perch. For Rossmässler,
his recommended combination characterized a self-
sufficient aquarium in which the evaporated water
had to be renewed only occasionally. It was also,
he asserted, an “effective instrument to familiarize
children with nature.”
What had caused this sudden change from salt-
to freshwater aquariums? Was it an attempt to dis-
tance oneself from Gosse, or had the handling and
maintaining of saltwater aquariums already come up
against too many limitations? In his booklet Das Süss-
wasser-Aquarium: Eine Anleitung zur Herstellung und
Pflege desselben (The Freshwater Aquarium: A Guide
for Making and Maintaining It), Rossmässler wrote
that it would require a mighty force to raise the small,
moderate freshwater aquarium above the minds of
the natural scientists and to expose it to the general
public. He even explained the depths of the pond as
if they were the abysses of the ocean:

Aquarium with
sea anemones
and starfish, 1857

­­62
 Freshwater
aquarium with
marsh plants,
around 1890

What nature conceals at the bottom of ponds and

marshes and around their for hydrophobics unap-
proachable edges will, for most people, remain an ever-
lasting secret, save the fish and crabs which are served
up at lunchtime.
By concentrating on fresh water, Rossmässler
caused a conceptual separation from that of the
world which surrounds the depths of the ocean—a
divide that remains even today. A lake or pond simply
does not have the qualities of an ocean, in spite of
all rhetorical attempts to make it just as attractive, as
Gustav Jäger tried to: “In comparison to the ocean,
life in fresh water is an idyll, smaller, calmer, but with
its own charm because it is closer to us, more com-
prehensible, homely.” The English botanist Shirley
Hibberd went even further and made some interest-
ing distinctions, explaining the differences by way
of the emotions evoked by either environment: “The
aspect of the Fresh-water tank is different indeed
from the Marine; it excites pleasure rather than
wonder; amuses more than it astonishes; but there is

­­63
a rare grace in its homely display of waving banners
and familiar fishes.”
Two camps resulted from this debate. While some
chose the easier-to-maintain freshwater aquariums,
others preferred the challenges and difficulties of
domesticating creatures from the deep. Maintain-
ing a saltwater aquarium was, quite simply, much
more exciting. Those of the first camp argued that
suitable water was nearly impossible to find. Where
could salt water be obtained in landlocked cities? As
an author in an 1889 issue of Naturwissenschaftliche
Wochenschrift (Natural Science Weekly) stated,
the practice of importing salt water left much to be
desired. When it finally arrived at its inland destina-
tion, “it did not really resemble utilizable sea-water
and often had a pungent smell.” In this case, the last
resort was a process of filtration, cleaning, and aer-
ating, which more often than not resulted in water
that was still unsuitable and was eventually thrown
down the drain. The solution to the problem was the
preparation of artificial salt water, which was easy
enough for chemists, who dissolved in water exact
amounts of common salt, sodium bromine, potas-
sium sulfate, sodium sulfate, gypsum, magnesia, and
magnesium chloride. This option was beyond most,
however, and the convenience of the freshwater
aquarium ultimately prevailed when it came to ama-
teur hobbyists.
The saltwater aquarium has nevertheless retained
its fascination for private households. Although only
a small number of aquarists have ever maintained
one, it is still with us. Reinhold Hoffmann, aquarist
and author of numerous articles in German specialist
magazines, was an accomplished advocate of the salt-
water aquarium, maintaining that it was immensely
more satisfying than its freshwater counterpart: “The
inhabitants will unfold freshness and beauty, equiva-
lent to that of their relatives in the open sea.”

­­64
 Aquaria
scenery from
Rossmässler’s
first script, 1857

Another issue concerning the saltwater aquarium,

was the question of combining different species of
marine life, as the prospering of one animal often
meant the death of another. By separating and inte-
grating, it should be possible to prevent the aquar-
ium from turning into a battleground. According to
Hoffmann, this was possible either by completely
discarding the idea of owning “a miniature Noah’s
Ark” or by installing a larger tank with different
compartments. Therefore, selection of the “ocean’s
horrors” was reduced to a sensible number of com-
patible animals. Man-eating sharks, large octopuses,
stingrays, and “thousands and thousands of other
species which cavort around the ocean, whether on
its bed or close to its surface, or in and around the
underwater algae forests” had to remain there. At
this moment in time, around 1890, Hoffmann still
believed that the envisioned utopian models were
impossible to create, though today’s gigantic inland
aquariums have realized his dream to admire up close
these “giants of the ocean.”

In the late 1880s, in an effort to solve the debate

between those that wanted the simplicity of the
freshwater aquarium and visual splendor of the
life-forms that inhabited saltwater environs, aquar-
ists took a drastic stab at cheating nature: Why not

­­65
try to gradually adapt marine animals to fresh water
and treat them as if they had never lived in anything
else? Eels and salmon served as role models because,
though they originate from the sea, they can often
be found swimming in rivers. Flounders and stick-
lebacks also feel at home in both types of water. In
Wilhelmshaven, on the North German coast, Hoff-
mann saw sea anemones, crabs, and fish that had
endured such “forced measures” and had survived in
fresh water for several months, though he also noted
that even the fresh water in Wilhelmshaven might
have been salty due to its close proximity to the North
Sea. To test his theories, Hoffman looked to animals
from the Baltic Sea because of its low salt content (as
well as others found furthest east), which he regarded
as suitable for adaptation. The crucial point was that
a lot of patience was required to make the transi-
tion from salt to fresh water as smooth as possible,
otherwise immediate death would have been the
result. Although here and there encouraging reports
were published on successful adaptations of flounders,
people seem to have been more fascinated by the
idea than the actual results, and the enthusiasm over
this new method seems to have faded as fast as it
had arrived.
While some tried to overturn the laws of nature
when it came to presenting marine life outside of its
natural environment, others turned to an arguably
more absurd solution: the “alcoholariums”—aquari-
ums filled not with water, but with alcohol. This type
of preservation was exhibited by the Berlin Museum
of Oceanography (later destroyed in World War II)
and was featured in a newspaper report from 1906:
The creatures swimming in [the alcoholarium] are, as
one will notice upon closer attention, already dead,
preserved in the poisonous liquid, thus maintaining
their full brilliancy of color for centuries to come. Alco-
hol destroys living tissue, but preserves the dead.

­­66
 The work of Leipzig-based glass sculptors Leo-
pold Blaschka and his son Rudolf should also
be mentioned here. From 1857 onward, they
produced glass models of invertebrates
that, as far as they could be kept in cap-
tivity, quickly lost their colorfulness. These
models gave a good impression of marine
Glass
animals in places where it was too complicated
model of jellyfish to keep a saltwater aquarium. Many of the Blaschkas’
models are still on display at the Peabody Museum
of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard Univer-
sity. These fake animals truly have transcended the
processes of nature; they perfectly complement the
dioramas of natural history museums where stuffed
lions and gazellas helped to recreate the illusion of
dangerous situations.

­­67
 A r r i v in g in t h e U n it e d St a t e s
Aquarist Societies and Magazines

According to U.S. magazines of the 1850s, Americans

followed the developments of this new apparatus,
the aquarium, very carefully. As early as August 1849,
an aquarium at Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, Eng-
land, which looked rather like a static garden pond,
aroused the brief attention of The American Whig
Review, and in 1852 an article entitled “The Parlor
Aquarium” appeared in The Living Age magazine,
which described the “Wardian case” and Robert War-
ington’s experiments. Until then, the aquarium had
been regarded as an interesting tool for botanists but
not for ordinary people. This point of view changed,
however, in 1854, after Gosse’s book The Aquarium
was reviewed in the The Living Age. The reviewer
appreciated Gosse’s attempts to shed light on the
functional principles of the aquarium, but he was
nevertheless full of reservations:
Although in theory it seems easy to form an aquarium,
especially at the sea-side...yet it requires some pre-
liminary knowledge, probably some luck, and unques-
tionably practice and attention.
In the same issue, another article entitled “Customs
and Manners under the Water” treated the aquarium in
a lighthearted manner, once again hailing Gosse’s book:

­­68
 To visit the inhabitants of the sea, in the constrained
manner that would have been compulsory in a being
formed like man, would have been of little use as
regards biographical details. What, then, was to be
done? To bring them to us, to be sure, since we could
not go comfortably to them—to have them up in a
witness-box and make them give an account of them-
selves. But it was necessary to do this in a particu-
lar way, for fish are no more at their ease out of the
water, than we are under it; it was necessary to bring
a portion of their element with them, and to have
all their little comforts about them, such as stones,
sand, mud, and marine-plants; it was necessary, in
short, for the purposes of science, to have a piece of
the sea laid upon our table: and, being necessary, this
was done.
If any readers had still not followed the recom-
mendation at the end of the article to buy the book,
they would surely do so after reading the vivid six-
page report, “My Aquarium,” published in February
1858 in The Atlantic Monthly. Although his name was
not mentioned once in the article, the descriptions of
the “Bernhard crab” or the “ghost-like prawns” were The Family
undeniably from Gosse. “Come and sit by this indoor Aquarium, title
page
sea, day by day, and learn to love its people”: what
reader could have resisted such an invitation?
Published in 1858, Henry D. Butler’s slim book The
Family Aquarium, or Aqua Vivarium—“a complete
adaptation to American peculiarities,” as he wrote in
the preface—was one of the first two books written
in the United States that dealt exclusively with the
aquarium. His explanations on how to maintain the
aquarium—very similar to those in today’s How-to
books—are less interesting than his analysis and the
embedded correlations he begins with. Within a short
period of time the aquarium, this extremely “attrac-
tive instrument,” had become a “necessary luxury in
every well-appointed household” and had completely

­­69
Feeding actinians replaced the old-fashioned “fish-globe” in Europe as
well as America:
Its neatness and elegance; its fascinating combina-
tion of subtle philosophy and commonplace every day
facts; its ever-changing, never wearying feature, [sic]
of kaleidoscopic novelty; its tempting peculiarity, to
thoughtful minds, as an introduction to natural history;
all constitute an attraction as chaste as it is beautiful,
as refined as it is irresistible.
For Butler, the aquarium represented an extraor-
dinary combination of science and art and became
the epitome of nineteenth-century discoveries, just as
important as the telescope or microscope. It finally
allowed its observers to step into unknown dimen-
sions, allowing them to view the unknown secrets of
the deep dark ocean. Butler did not hesitate to men-
tion his own theory of the aquarium, that the new
invention is “a faithful copy…a miniature facsimile
of the fascinating reality in its exquisite colors, and
replete with its inexplicable revelations.”
Arthur M. Edwards’s Life Below the Waters or the
Aquarium in America was published on the heels of

­­70
Butler’s book. Edwards noted shops in New York that
already sold aquariums and the necessary accesso-
ries, instructed how to set up an aquarium at home,
and introduced some of the ocean’s creatures, but a
devastating review in The Atlantic Monthly from
September 1858, which accused it of being hastily
printed, poorly conceived, and filled with errors,
crushed its chances at success.
The enthusiasm found in these books and maga-
zines was not solely responsible for the growth of the
aquarium’s popularity on this side of the Atlantic. The
United States had its own share of pioneers in home
aquariums. William Stimson, collector and trustee
of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
in 1849, is believed to have owned the first func-
tional aquariums—as many as seven or eight—in the
United States; if The North American Review of July
1858 can be believed, he had not even been aware of
contemporary experiments in Great Britain.
A certain Elizabeth Emerson Damon from Windsor,
Vermont is also believed to have been among the first
owners of an aquarium in the United States, accord-
ing to William E. Damon (whose relationship to Miss
Damon is unspecified), as written in his 1879 volume
Ocean Wonders:
So far as I have been able to ascertain, the pioneer
inductor of the private aquarium in this country was
Miss Elizabeth Emerson Damon...and her first essays
were made with the simple apparatus of a two-quart
glass jar, with a few fish, some tadpoles and snails,
and some Potamogeton (common pond weed); but
so perfectly balanced was this young aquarium with
animal and vegetable life, that I fell in love with it at
first sight.
William Damon was a successful businessman who
worked as the superintendent of the credit department
at Tiffany’s in New York. In his spare time, he com-
mitted himself to natural science and oceanography,

­­71
Illustration of an
attack by a giant
squid in Ocean
Wonders

playing an important role in importing tropical fish

to New York as well as participating in the concep-
tual design of New York’s first public aquarium. In his
book, Damon summarizes marine creatures in plain
language and dedicates the last section of the book
to explanations about salt- and freshwater aquariums.
Damon claimed that “the study of natural objects
is as good a discipline for the mind as is exclusive
devotion to the classics.” Indeed, his enthusiasm was
tremendous:
The ocean! The vast, glorious, boundless blue! How
the vision of sunny hours, inspiring breezes, the invigo-
rating scent of the salt air, and the sparkling of bright
sea-foam, rises at thought of the great deep—that rest-
less, deceptive, yet ever-enchanting siren, which lures
us in every tone of the gamut to trust ourselves on its
sparkling bosom!

­­72
 Looking back, Hugo Mulertt was hugely respon-
sible for the increase in private hobby aquariums in
the United States Born in Leipzig, Mulertt came to
America around 1869 with the second big wave of
German immigrants, settling down in Cincinnati and
becoming a well known aquarist and florist
in the subsequent decade. As Albert Klee
notes in his book The Toy Fish, Mulertt’s
shop offered a whole range of products:
aquariums made of cast iron, sheet metal,
terra cotta, or “Cincinnati faience” ceramics,
as well as all the necessary accessories such
as tuft stone ornaments, ready fish feed, and
a special sort of cement for aquariums. He
also had his own ingenious goldfish hatch-
ery and was appointed the Assistant Commissioner Hugo Mulertt
of Fishes for the District of Southern Ohio. Mulertt
discovered that the area surrounding Cincinnati was
perfect for cultivating fish and became a very suc-
cessful breeder of German carp in this region, no
doubt thanks to the knowledge he gained from pio-
neers such as Seth Green and Stephen H. Ainsworth
who, according to the November 1868 Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine, had for decades been breeding
salmon and trout in order to release them into rivers.
From the end of the 1870s, Mulertt additionally con-
centrated on importing wild aquarium plants from

Floor plan of
Mulertt’s fish
hatchery

­­73
Mulertt’s catalog

the Amazon region. He started breeding these plants

in his expansive nursery, and soon his booming busi-
ness supplied aquarists from all over the country with
Sagittaria subulata, his own breed Ludwigia mulertti
and, of course, fish.
In 1883 his book The Goldfish and Its Culture was
published and enjoyed numerous reprints. According
to his calculations, about two million goldfish, worth
300,000 dollars, were sold annually in the United
States Mulertt exhibited his fish-breeding plants at
contemporary industrial fairs such as the Cincin-
nati Industrial Exposition in 1879 or the Centennial
Exposition in Cincinnati in 1888, generating mas-
sive exposure and a surge in demand. Just after the
Centennial Exposition, he relocated his business to

­­74
Brooklyn, New York, where local aquarist groups wel-
comed him with open arms.
Like Mulertt, Rear Admiral Daniel Ammen of the
U.S. Navy also rendered outstanding services to the
import of fish. In 1878 he apparently presented the
U.S. Fish Commission with goldfish imported from
Japan. William P. Seal from Philadelphia also played
an important role in the breeding of goldfish, when in
1873 he took charge of the aquariums at the oceanog-
raphy station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A few
years later the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington,
D.C. commissioned him with the construction and
supervision of the U.S. Fish Commission’s exhibit at
the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
Previously only adored by a small number of far-
flung individuals, the aquarium was now more and
more a community venture.

The 1870s saw the appearance of the first aquarist

societies in Germany, which soon began to publish
their own magazines. The Triton Society, founded in
Berlin in 1888, was set on aggressively promoting the
hobby “by influencing the general public, to confront
all existing prejudices and superstitions,” as they wrote
in their mission statement. Five years later, the first
U.S. aquarist society was founded in New York City
by Baron von Schlichting, a German immigrant—it is
not surprising, then, that this society was also named
Triton and that German was the official society lan-
guage. Soon after, the Salamander Society was also
established in New York, and in 1896 the Aquarium
Society in Jersey City, New Jersey was formed.
The purpose of these societies exceeded the objec-
tives drawn up in their charters. Just as other nature
societies or hobbies, these groups also had psycho-
logical ramifications: the amateur naturalists found
acknowledgment and appreciation from science pro-
fessionals for their competent work. In an attempt

­­75
The Aquarium,
title page

to receive public approval, according to the historian

Andreas W. Daum, the names of these societies were
often taken from mythology: “Daphnia and Heros, Isis
and Neptune, Proteus and Triton gathered merrily
amongst flower lovers, fish breeders and caterpillar
collectors.” But the societies were not only character-
ized by harmony; they were also the place of enthu-
siastic free-for-alls and conflicts of competence. The
societies swiftly developed into hierarchical cliques
with their own elite.
The development of specialized magazines in the
United States naturally paralleled the formation of
these societies. The New York Aquarium Journal,

­­76
published for the first time in October 1876 by the
natural scientist W. S. Ward, is considered to be the
world’s first aquarium magazine, though it unfortu-
nately ceased publication just seven months later.
The issues consisted of only eight or ten pages but
were packed with advertisements, articles, and col-
umns such as “For Our Young Folks—Told by Uncle
Octopus.” From 1878 until the early 1880s, Mulertt’s
own magazine The Aquarium appeared in Cincin-
nati. Ten years later, after relocating to Brooklyn, he
resumed publishing the quarterly, which comprised
twenty-five pages and contained news of everything
dear to aquarists, such as the newest aquatic species
or fish disease. The establishment of these special-
ized magazines, which were eagerly swapped by the
interested parties, was another major step toward the
popularization of the aquarium.

­­77
 E x ot ic Spe cie s a n d Tra n spo r t
Diverging Beliefs

In the mid-nineteenth century, when enthusiasm for

the aquarium began to explode around the world,
private tanks were—with the exception of goldfish—
almost exclusively inhabited by animals native to the
country of the aquarist’s origin. By the late-1860s,
however, the picture began to change dramatically.
More and more often, colorful imports
“Is it possible to keep a stone from distant countries inhabited the
bass and a macropodus in the
aquariums. In 1869 the first exotic toy fish
same receptacle? If both are of
a size which prevents them from reached Europe: one hundred Macropo-
devouring each other, yes.” dus, also known as paradise fish, which
—Blätter für Aquarien- und Terra- a French consul in Ningbo, China, sent
rienfreunde, 1894
to the Parisian breeder Paul Carbonnier.
Breeds of this import were presented in
Berlin as early as 1876. In the same year, the animal
lover and philanthropist Adophus Busch from St.
Louis brought paradise fish to the United States after
seeing them in his native Germany.
The actual monetary value of fish was dependant
on their rarity. The higher the demand for a specific
species, the more fish were imported or, if possible,
bred until the market was saturated or another fish
became the new fad. The aquarium became more
and more standardized due to the increasing num-
ber of suppliers and specialty shops devoted to this

­­78
 Exotic toy fish

ever-growing hobby. Fish with bright colors, a new

shape, or unusual characteristics were especially
prestigious—as for example the viviparous toy fish,
the triumphant reception of which enjoyed exten-
sive coverage in all the specialized magazines.
It was the colorfulness of the new exotic fresh-
water fish that made aquarists’ hearts beat faster.
But there were also “traditionalists” who tried to
counteract this trend. Sometimes the incentive
was to keep fish that one caught oneself. Or, if one
insisted on owning a foreign fish, it was suggested
to keep them together with some native fish, as the
author of “A Word for our Proletarians,” published
in Blätter für Aquarien- und Terrarienfreunde did
in an article 1891. Humble minnows and bit-
Minnow terlings—the “sparrows” of the fish world—were
strongly recommended for this role of “proletar-
ians.”
This seemingly trivial dispute about minnows,
bitterlings, and “foreigners” concealed a more
basic question: What is the aquarium hobby really
about? Is it the real conception and comprehen-
sion of nature, or is it just a distraction, a game,

­­79
 vain razzmatazz? Those that felt it was the former
criticized the breeding of exotic fish and objected to
such inane doings as aquaristic societies handing out
prizes for special songbooks dedicated to the hobby,
which could put the serious character of natural-
ism at risk. Hairsplitting became the order of the
day: “Is the ‘vivarium sport’ just science or scientific
rigor?” asked one specialist magazine. Daum believes
that the whole amateur science movement had a
“chameleon-like appearance,” always moving between
“hobby scientist and private society bliss on the one
hand and academic expectations on the other.”
Pictures of elephants and giraffes being trans-
ported halfway around the world to zoological gar-
dens where they were then presented to awestruck
audiences were commonplace. But there was no such
fanfare for fish. If they were imported from far away,
which had become quite common since the 1890s,
their tranquil journey took place in jugs and boxes
and was not accompanied by the roars and clamor
that followed apes and lions. Nor was there any pro-
test—ethical questions that dogged the displacement
of mammals and birds were absent, for the transpor-
tation of marine animals was carried out, as Gustav
Jäger noted, without any noticeable side effects:
While animals of the skies and land suffer to some
degree under their displacement into a cage and

Advertisement
for Mulertt’s
Condensed Fish
Food, 1883

­­80
 experience a change in their behavior, eventually liv-
ing in an unnatural habitat which prevents the appear-
ance of harmonic impressions, life unfolds naturally in
an aquarium where animals are exactly the same as in
the wild.
The suffering of the fish in the martyrdom of aquar-
ium life could not be seen. Despite occasional maga-
zine articles on the “appropriate keeping” of animals
or on how to counteract animal cruelty, there was no
real pity for fish, and the legitimacy of the aquarium
was never debated. The question of whether the fish
were being kept inappropriately in aquariums was
rarely asked, if ever. It is only as recent as 2003 that
Scottish scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edin-
burgh discovered that fish could actually feel pain.
The transportation of fish over long distances is
a science in itself. According to the Berlin aquarist
Paul Nitsche, it was “almost easier to import a living
elephant than a fish the size of your finger.” The dif-
ficulties became very clear in an article published
in 1876 in the New York Aquarium Journal that dealt
with the transport of eighty-eight Kingyo goldfish
from Japan to the United States:
The captain of the steamer...built a tank on the
steamer to accommodate them, and took in a supply
of river water; but it was soon found that the motion of
the ship dashed the fish against the sides of the tank
and many were lost. To obviate this a smaller tank was
built and suspended like a compass, which counter-
acted the motion of the ship; but notwithstanding all
the care bestowed on them only fifteen arrived in San
Francisco, all in a very weak condition. Of these, eight
subsequently died.
Transport within the United States was less diffi-
cult. Hugo Mulertt sent his fish from Ohio and later
from Brooklyn right across the country to San Fran-
cisco. For transport via rail he used soldered cans
that were generic to the coal oil trade, which were

­­81
 fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter with a five-inch
opening at the top. The tops were perforated and thus
open to the air, and water occupied four-fifths of the
total can volume. This method was used extensively
until the arrival of shipping bags made of plastic in
the 1950s.
Around the turn of the century, Nitsche wrote a
manual for the import of fish from oversea locales,
which also gave seamen, captains, and other voyag-
ers instructions on how to earn easy money with an
additional income. Natives caught the animals usu-
ally with dip nets or cast nets in the wild. Sometimes
they even dammed small branches of a river or used
toxins made from bark and leaves. A small emission of
these toxins into the water made the fish numb, limit-
ing their movements. Generally, imports took place
randomly—if space was available, fish were taken on
board. It was always a surprise to discover what had
actually made the journey.
Jugs made of zinc plate, approximately three feet
in diameter and with a wooden base, were recom-
mended for importing fish. The jugs’ outer and inner
walls had to be painted white due to the tropical sun
and to prevent oxidation. They were hung in robust
boxes to avoid being crushed during heavy seas
Simple zinc jug (although these measures were unnecessary if they
for transporting
fish (above) and were transported on larger passenger vessels).
the box in which Enameled jugs were preferred over zinc-plated
they were hung to
jugs because they tolerated salt water and did not
reduce the ship’s
movement affect- undergo chemical bonding, which could harm the
ing the jugs, 1901 gills or inner organs of the fish. Transportation of the
fish always took place in open jugs, placed into
wicker baskets to protect the enamel. Nitsche
reported about one of his friends, a naval
officer, who had successfully used a big pine
tub—the type usually used for doing laundry
—to transport telescope and fantail fish from
China and Japan. The tub was tightly closed

­­82
with wooden slats that allowed sufficient light to
enter but prevented water from escaping. If these
tubs were not completely filled, then there was no
need to change the water during a six-to-eight-
week voyage. Following this logic, any other
type of clean barrel could be used.
A “sheet steel fish jug” with a special
lid was also thought to be suitable. An
integrated aeration device operated from
the outside by bellows or, even better, a
bicycle foot pump, supplied the jug with fresh
air. Stewards, responsible for the import, stored these Specially
prepared wooden
jugs in their cabins for the journey from New York to tub, 1901, and
Europe. It was even possible to adapt “difficult fish” (below) sheet
steel fish jug with
to the still water of the containers. Wires, canvas, and
bellow-aeration
nets were all used to keep away cigarette butts and device
tar and coal dust from the funnels, to stop cats from
finding a tasty meal, and to prevent the contents
escaping from the jugs.
The biggest dangers for the fish were suf-
focation due to overpopulation, eating food
unfit for consumption, and contamination
from fish that did not survive the journey;
when exchanging the water it was also
important to remember that the waters
varied from place to place. Nitsche thus
recommended to gradually adapt the fish
to the exchange:
If the journey, for example, began with Shanghai
water and new water was taken onboard in Hong
Kong; at first use 2/3 Shanghai and only 1/3 Hong
Kong, then 1/2 Shanghai and 1/2 Hong Kong, then 1/3
Shanghai and 2/3 Hong Kong and finally only Hong
Kong water.
The captain always had to be informed of the esti-
mated water consumption, even if that meant that
he would prohibit the load. Savvy importers could
often win the captain over by pointing out that the

­­83
used water could always be employed to swab the
decks. Equally important to fish transporters was the
temperature during the journey. The best months for
transportation from East Asia were April to October,
while fish that were accustomed to lower tempera-
tures could be fetched from New York during the
winter months.
Once on land, subsequent transport by wagon or on
horseback should, according to Nitsche, be categori-
cally avoided, as this could cause the ruin of the whole
venture at the last minute. The fish could be violently
thrown about and perish. Instead, the fish should be
carried either in jugs or in tanks hanging from a pole.
In Nitsche’s opinion transportation in hanging jugs
was ideal, as the fish would not be thrown about even
during a storm. Special rules applied for the shipment
of marine animals: actinians, sea urchins, snails, and
mussels were packed with seaweed or pieces of sponge
into baskets; sessile animals with stones; and crabs
in tanks with little water as they “have to have the
possibility to stick their noses out from time to time.”
The transport of aquatic plants took place in boxes
that were also used for shipping grapes, though in the
plants’ case, everything was additionally wrapped in
moss and damp paper.
Transportation involved other dangers too: swin-
dles and dirty tricks were daily business in the toy fish
trade. Sailors stole and sold fish, and exporters deliv-
ered unordered goods. There were also cases where
animals were delivered several times via c.o.d., but
not accepted by the addressee; the postal service
then auctioned off these animals at ridiculously low
prices to the very same person. Agreements saying
that only animals that survived transport had to be
paid for were similarly tricky. It was not uncommon,
according to Nitsche, that “the animals, dead as a
dodo, were offered at exorbitantly high prices, but
quite often also at give-away prices, sometimes via

­­84
 Transport of
aquariums on
horse-drawn
carriages, in
the background
the zoological
mail-order house
Glaschker in
Leipzig, Germany,
around 1900

a pseudo address, often in the most impertinent way

through the respective buyer himself.”
The following decades experienced a professional-
ization of the whole process: representatives of the
company would pick up the fish at a collecting point
and take them to the harbor, from which they could
be shipped to other seaports. Given all the risks and
rampant corruption, every effort was taken to become
independent of the import of fish from faraway places.
For many, if not most, freshwater fish could be bred
in captivity. It was only much later, with the advent
of widespread air travel, that the wish for new, exotic
marine fish species could be more easily fulfilled.
Even today, however, there is still a considerable loss
of fish during flights, no matter how elaborate the
artificial environment created for transport.

­­85
 Fa sh io n Sh ow
Typology of Parlor Aquariums

Before special tanks became available people often kept

their fish in kitchen pans and jars. Emil Rossmässler
wrote that “housemaids were often wrongly accused
of stealing, until the hollowware was rediscovered on
the master’s table full of different animals and strange
aquatic plants.” He also complained that the glassworks
were not producing enough aquariums and
“If your sojourn at the sea-side
is to be brief, or if you do not that the selection of box aquariums manu-
feel disposed to purchase one of factured by ironworks was insufficient. But
the glass tanks of the dealers in he was confident that the laws of supply
aquarian wares,—a race which
has recently sprung up “all along
and demand would soon change this situa-
shore,”—take a wash-basin, a tion, and he was right: by the 1860s, aquar-
milk-pan, or a foot-bath, and you iums were being mass-produced in every
can improvise an aquarium.”
possible shape and combination, often so
—The North American Review,
July 1858 elaborately decorated that one wondered
what was more important—the contents,
or the aquarium itself.
Quite often one or several of the aquarium’s panels
were of gray slate, which allowed the water to stay
cool in summer and created a pleasant, semi-dark
environment for the fish. Most aquariums had a
simple box shape, since curved glass made it difficult
to see inside a tank and prevented the use of a magni-
fying glass. Nonetheless, oddly shaped aquariums did
exist. One of the most unusual is recorded in an old

­­86
 Aquarium
installation in the
Maurisches Haus
at Frankfurt Zoo,
around 1860

British drawing of a “cabinet aquarium”: placed upon

pompously decorated shelves were approximately
twenty glass tanks that decreased in size from the
bottom to the top. A picture from circa 1858 has also
survived and displays a small aquarium system at the
zoo in Frankfurt, Germany, in which seven intercon-
nected tanks stand in front of a window on a scrolled
table. Another special form is the paludarium, or
marsh aquarium. This combines the aquarium and
the terrarium, placing boulders and numer-
ous plants above the water level for amphib-
ians and turtles. Reference books at the
time also referred to a finely equipped parlor
aquarium, which was also known as a room
fountain with flower table and aquarium.
The advantageous feature of this apparatus
was, as K. G. Lutz described in his book,
Das Süsswasser Aquarium (The Freshwater
Aquarium), that it cleaned and moisturized the air of Cabinet aquarium
the room, having “an extraordinary beneficial effect
on your health.”
The combination of fish and canaries appeared in
numerous variations. One contraption was a water-
filled glass attachment with a hole through the
middle that could be placed atop a birdcage. The
hole provided just enough space for a canary to sit

­­87
 on a perch and watch the fish swimming
around. The idea was not new: already
in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury goldfish and canaries had become
reluctant parlor companions. Some
people even believed to see a strange
sort of interaction between fish and
bird. They would sit for hours gazing at
the animals and actually convince them-
Combination
selves that the fish was dancing to the
of cage and
aquarium song of the imprisoned bird.
Aquariums were often placed on win-
dow sills or even, as shown in an exam-
ple from Lloyd’s 1858 catalog, attached to
windows as window boxes. The placing of an aquar- Salon aquarium
ium in front of a window (whether indoors or out- with fountain

doors) was problematic, as the fish were illuminated

by the light from the window and the side facing the
observers was always in their shadow. Therefore the
fish often seemed colorless and were not shown to
their best advantage. Furthermore, the direct sun
encouraged algae growth. An improvement to this
situation was the “skylight aquarium” in which an
indirect ray of light entered the aquarium from a

Window aquarium,
around 1858

­­88
 mirror fixed at an angle above it. This caused the
plants to grow vertically toward the light and elimi-
nated the cast shadows. With its matte, milky light,
this aquarium took on a mystical appearance.
The sketch of a “terrace aquarium” surrounded by
flower pots dates from the 1890s. This construction
required an extremely robust iron frame onto which
three different-sized tanks were placed, one upon
the other, thus allowing enthusiasts to create various
environments and to separate animals that did not
Window aquarium appreciate each other’s company.
Some aquariums were hung on walls and func-
tioned as “moving pictures.” But these wall
aquariums presented hidden dangers, as Her-
mann Lachmann explained in Blätter für
Aquarien- und Terrarienfreunde:
Even though these look wonderful after
installation, the magnificence does not last
for long. It is just folly and extremely unsafe
since the aquarium is hanging on a wall. The
hooks could come loose allowing the whole
aquarium to come crashing down; what an
expensive mess that would be. Terrace aquarium
In contrast, a “floating sea” was a glass bell fifteen
inches in diameter and twenty-and-a-half inches high

Wall aquarium

­­89
 that hung in front of a window inside the room.
This aquarium was advertised as being the solu-
tion in an 1859 edition of Kosmos Zeitschrift für alle
angewandten Naturwissenschaften (Kosmos Maga-
zine for all Applied Natural Sciences). Due to its
design, room space could be used for other pur-
poses if need be, a perfect view inside the aquarium
was always guaranteed, and above all it was cheaper
“floating sea” to install than other aquariums. The glass sphere was
aquarium, 1859 held by strong cords and placed in a kind of basket
to which the cords were attached. According to the
instructions, the three pieces of cord that support the
whole aquarium are connected to a piece of twisted
hemp string of the same strength. The hemp string is
fixed above the window and runs on one side through
two interconnected porcelain rings of finger width;
therefore it is possible to simply draw up the tank if
you desire to use the space in front of the window for
another purpose or if the windows are to be cleaned,
and can be lowered if the tank is to be cleaned
or replaced.
Seashells filled with bog soil were placed on the
floor of the aquarium as “flower pots.” With this final
detail, one could let the aquarium feel the effects of
nature like an outdoor pond: rainwater, fresh air, cool-
ness during the night, protection from the sun either
via a window blind or a strategically placed parasol,
and peace and quiet, because life in this little “float-
ing ocean” was best left to itself.
Another special model was the basin or pool aquar-
ium. This type originated in Great Britain and consisted
of a clay base that was placed in the ground of winter
gardens and hothouses. All these tanks had a rock con-
glomeration in the middle, on which marsh plants and
ferns protruded from underneath. In and around towns
these basins, which usually contained a fountain, were
seen as a replacement for natural ponds and pools that
had either dried up or been filled in. Though pleasant, a

­­90
 Basin aquarium
in Chatsworth,
1849

good view of the creatures in the water was problematic

due to the reduced transparency.
The craziest aquarium of all had to be a tank deco-
rated with four Wilhelminian eagles, advertised by a
company from Hamburg in an 1895 edition of Blät-
ter für Aquarien- und Terrarienfreunde. Are the eagles
just guardposts of what is inside the tank or can this
be interpreted as an expression of the owner’s all-
encompassing patriotism? No one can know. Another
strange variant was the “insect aquarium,” which was
described in an 1890s article in the same magazine
as a “very interesting specialty” worth all the “blood,
sweat, and tears.” This kind of aquarium was usually
home to aquatic spiders, and according to the author
there was nothing more fascinating than watching
these creatures build their nests.

­­91
Advertisement
for the
Wilhelminian
aquarium, 1895

Ingenuity knew no bounds if the financial means

were not available for a special aquarium. In 1890 a
Blätter für Aquarien- und Terrarienfreunde subscriber
recounted how he had converted a very inexpensive
sulfuric acid jar into an aquarium because he could
not afford a glass bell. He wrapped a piece of string
soaked in turpentine around the bottle and lit it. After
the flames had extinguished, the bottle split into two
pieces as if it had been cut with a knife. The portion
with the bottleneck functioned as the aquarium. The
neck was sealed with pitch-soaked bung, through
which a fountain and a waste pipe were fed. The
stump of an old tree from local woods was used as
a natural base for the apparatus. Along similar lines,
later specialized magazines often described aquari-
ums made of stoneware. This seems rather impracti-
cal, however, as the animals could only be viewed—if
at all—from above, and the light required for plant
growth was almost nonexistent.
It was the period of small landscapes. The world
was presented in quaint tableaus: whether it was a
miniature railroad snaking its way through a rugged

­­92
mountainous backdrop or a miniature house in which
a child’s doll could “live.” The “ocean landscapes”
of aquariums were similarly filled with small tuff
grottos purchased from specialty shops or created
by the owners themselves out of cement. Another
variation were the small swimming islands made of
cork into which a small plant pot could be placed.
In response to this trend, specialized aquarist maga-
zines—such as an 1886 article in Isis—began to warn
of these “dangerous bits and pieces” and “exaggerated
affectations” such as small castle ruins, “since they
mask the simple and grand beauty of nature.”

In 1879 William Damon had stated in Ocean Wonders

that during the first two decades since the invention
of the aquarium, oxygenation of the water in private
aquariums had proven to be best achieved by plants.
The best of all means, the true scientific and natural
mode, which the Creator himself has adopted, is to
oxygenate the water by plants. No other method will
keep it so clear. As evidence of this, I can to-day take
a tumbler of water out of a tank that has had only
the natural aëration of plants, which has not been
meddled with for years, and in which I have kept all
that time a large and varied assortment of animals;
and it will equal the Croton [River] in purity and
clearness, and far surpass it in softness, and in living,
sparkling brightness.
But Damon was proved wrong, and it was not
long before appliances appeared that optimized
the water quality of private aquariums. The grow-
ing use of electricity in the 1880s and 1890s allowed
for flowing water in aquariums, as well as heating
devices for tropical fish used to higher temperatures.
An example of this new technology was the heated
aquarium “Thermokon,” whose base had a dome-
shaped inward curvature into which a heating lamp
could be placed. Another variation was a zinc-plated

­­93
 copper cauldron, which was attached to the aquar-
ium and heated by a spirit or oil lamp. A pipe went
from the cauldron over the edge of the tank into the
water, while another pipe came out of the water and
back into the cauldron. The contraption was based
on the principle that warm water rises due to its low
specific weight, whereas cold water falls. The whole
device was triggered by sucking aquarium water into
the cauldron through a rubber hose until the caul-
dron was full. Subsequently, the flame underneath
the cauldron was lit. As soon as the
water was warm enough it rose from
the cauldron via the upper pipe and
entered the aquarium while the cold
water from the aquarium entered the
cauldron via the other pipe.
Reflectors were also available that
helped to diffuse light onto the surface
of the water, enabling a better view
inside the aquarium in the evenings or
on darker days. And the list of helpful
appliances for parlor aquariums did
not end here: further optimized foun-
tains in which the oxygen was caught
and dragged down by the falling water,
but also waterfall systems and elabo-
rate fountain mechanisms enriched
Aquarium with
simple aerator the spectrum of aquarium appliances. They were all
supposed to ensure a supply of oxygen and a move-
ment of water.
One parlor fountain manufactured in Germany
worked on the principle of the “Heron fountain.” A
continuous fountain was guaranteed by two airtight
iron jars that could be rotated around an axis and were
interconnected via a pipe. The water flowing from the
aquarium compressed the air in the lower jar and the
pressure forced the water in the upper jar to spurt
out through the pipe. When the upper jar was empty

­­94
and the lower one full, all it required was a
simple rotation of the jars around the axis to
restart the process.
One of the most complicated devices for
the aquarium had to be an aeration appara-
tus that required a three-page description in
the Naturwissenschaftlicher Wochenschrift
(Natural Science Weekly) in 1889. Two zinc
cauldrons, bellows, a regulator, and various
pipes were connected to create an instal-
lation that could have been mistaken for a
forerunner of the intravenous drip. It was
supported by a sort of gallows high up in
the room. Obviously its designer, the aquar-
ist Hermann Lachmann, realized that the
apparatus would reduce the overall aes-
thetic appearance of the aquarium, and he Parlor fountain
with Heron
pointed out that it should not stand right next to the fountain, 1892
tank, but rather be placed in the next room, the cellar,
or anywhere else out of sight. In this case the conduit

Aerator by
Hermann
Lachmann, 1889

­­95
would have to be extended and directed around the
edge of the room. But how did the thing function?
Lachmann tried to explain:
The water from the upper cauldron enters the bellows
d drop by drop, and is held there due to the back pres-
sure from the aquarium and the winding of the spiral
until sufficient water has collected in the bellows to
overcome the back pressure. It subsequently drains off
and entrains an amount of air from the bellows that is
greater than the actual volume of water. The air in the
lower cauldron is compressed by the inflowing water
and the incoming air and forced through its only escape
route pipe 3. From here it makes its way through the
regulator e and outflow pipe k to the spray nozzle z in
the aquarium, forming fine pearls in the water.
Lachmann’s aerator, which functioned without
any water consumption, could be constructed by
any plumber. Never mind how strange it all seemed
and looked, Lachmann contended, “the well-being
of the aquarium inhabitants will be more than enough
compensation.”
The aquarium and the habitat trapped inside
it had no chance of survival without the extremely
large and overpowering aeration apparatus, a symbol
of the industrial age if ever there was one. Indeed,
no longer was nature truly nature. In a period that
worshiped technical innovations and during which
mechanization took command, the aquarium did not
go unaffected. The running of an aquarium required
a substantial degree of technical know-how, and this
caused Lloyd to write an article for the American
Naturalist in 1876:
Aquarium work, being hydraulic engineering on a
small scale, is essentially the work of an engineer, and
not that of an architect, unless he is also an engineer
and a mathematician.
The aquarium had become an integral part of the
Victorian salon, living side by side with plants and

­­96
 French aquarium,
1859

other adventurous objects, enabling contact with

nature in the heart of the city. With its organic forms
and often flamboyant ornaments it beautified the
living room, that place of retreat from the cold indus-
trial world of the nineteenth century. It turned the
room into a “living,” loveable world where one’s own
identity could be retained. And the aquarium played
another important role: it became a catalyst for the
imagination, allowing its observers to broaden their
minds, to imagine the depths of the human soul, and
maybe even trace visions of the unknown. And more:
the “moving pictures” not only stimulated the mind
but also simulated a journey. Why go anywhere else
when the family salon, this mirror to the world, had
everything modern, yet was still close to nature? This
question must have crossed many a mind.

­­97
Moving images in the living room
 “A Ne w Kin d o f Th e a te r”
The Large Aquariums

Despite their complicated upkeep, private saltwater

aquariums still had—for a short period of time—a
small but tenacious following, at first in Great Britain,
then on the American east coast, and sporadically in
France and northern Germany. In many other coun-
tries the saltwater aquarium only really appeared in
a much larger form, under professional conditions.
Public aquariums were almost always integrated into
already well-established zoological gardens.
The first public aquarium opened its doors in May
1853 in Regent’s Park, London, not long after the
aquarium itself was invented. A classical steel-glass
construction resembling a hothouse, the Fish House,
as it was known, comprised a vast number of small

The interior of
the London Fish
House, the first
public aquarium

­­99
 salt and freshwater aquariums. Some were attached
to the walls while others stood on tables in the middle
of the bright room, covered with slate to keep out sun-
light and dust. Given the aquarium was a brand new
apparatus, a water exchange system was still a far-
off, utopian idea; fresh salt water had to be brought
directly from the sea. Alexander Ussner, manager of
the Vienna aquarium, remembered in 1860:
A cry of admiration and astonishment went literally not
only around Europe, but around the whole civilized
world when this first water menagerie was opened to
the public. The colors and variety of the shapes and
forms previously only known to a few scholars unfolded
in front of their eyes, and their amazement spread by
word and mouth.
Soon thereafter, the legendary showman Phineas
This poster
T. Barnum, who seemed to have a sixth sense for all
advertised sorts of curiosities that audiences craved, appeared
Phineas T. on the aquarium stage. In 1856, shortly after a visit to
Barnum’s
curiosity: The
London where, as a bankrupt businessman, Barnum
“real” mermaid gave quite successful lectures on “The Art of Money
Making,” he started exhibit-
ing aquariums in his Ameri-
can Museum in New York.
The American Museum,
located on the corner of
Broadway and Ann Street
in Lower Manhattan until it
was destroyed by a great fire
in 1865, had been established
in 1841 and was an important
center for the development of
urban entertainment culture
in the nineteenth century.
Here, the aquarium was pre-
sented alongside the “wonders
of the world,” which included
a “real mermaid” (the torso of

­­100
“FeeJee Mermaid” was actually the upper body of a The Aquarial
Gardens, Boston
stuffed ape with the tail of a fish) and a “six-foot man-
1859
eating chicken.”
Other public aquariums soon followed. In December
1857 Scientific American informed its readers of an
aquarium that had been set up by the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington. Two years later, in 1859,
James Ambrose Cutting and Henry Butler, co-owner
of the American Museum and author of The Family
Aquarium, opened the Aquarial Gardens in a neo-
classical building on Bromfield Street in Boston. The
Boston Post hailed a completely new experience:
These Ocean Conservatories are filled with rare marine
animals imported and collected exclusively for this
establishment. They present us with a perfect and strik-
ing illustration of life beneath the waters.
The words of a flyer eagerly handed out to pass-
ersby were even more flowery:
The scene is at once wonderful and intensely beauti-
ful. Hours of delight may be spent watching the habi-
tats of the animals, seizing and devouring their prey
and disporting as freely as if they were still enjoying
their full freedom in the ocean or river.

­­101
Exterior view of Approximately forty basins containing twenty to
the aquarium thirty gallons of water were arranged in a circle on
in the Jardin
d’Acclimatation,
tables to form a large aquarium panorama. There
1860 were perch, crabs, starfish, sea anemones, snails,
periwinkles, sunfish, carp, sea ravens, flounders, rays,
jellyfish, clams, pickerel, sticklebacks, horned pout,
bass, and a few turtles. A man-eating shark was also
advertised, but only for a short while; apparently it
did not survive very long.
In Europe, where competition to open the most
impressive aquarium was in full swing, an aquarium
was developed in 1860 in the Jardin d’Acclimatation
in Paris. It was a windowless brick construction with
integrated wall aquariums and looked very much like
an arcade. Arthur Mangin, one of the most important
popularizers of the natural sciences in nineteenth-
century France, described the building’s interior as “a
completely new kind of theater, where the reality of
submarine life is displayed.” The lighting principles

­­102
were very different from those of the comparatively The corridor of
simple Fish House in London. The gallery was semi- the aquarium
in the Jardin
dark, the only light source emanating from above and d’Acclimatation,
entering the room via the transparent tanks. The pre- 1860
cise incidence of light was extremely important; too
much would lead to a high degree of algae, resulting
in turbid water and reduced transparency. Once visi-
tors had become accustomed to the light conditions,
a completely new optical experience awaited them,
according to Mangin:
As there are no surrounding objects to distract the
attention, one completely focuses on the living Poly-
rama, and because the concept of size is only relative,
the pictures start to take on larger and larger dimen-
sions, or their real dimensions vanish, only to reappear
in the observer’s perception.
The “Polyrama” refers to the “Polyrama Panoptique,”
or Diorama, which was invented by Louis Jacques
Mandé Daguerre in 1822. It is a stage designed to

­­103
accommodate changing light effects in a dark room,
where pictures move around the audience giving
them the feeling of being at the center of a wonder-
ful play. The technique was used to great effect at
the Jardin d’Acclimatation, making “one forget about
how many artificial resources had to be employed to
create such an exposition,“ according to the Deutsche
Bauzeitung (German Construction Magazine). In this
form and size—presented as a copy and simulacrum
of the submarine world—the aquarium became a
completely new experience, even for those who had
their own at home. Never before had visitors been
able to see so many marine creatures in such a con-
centrated form and without external influences. The
atmosphere created when large numbers of people
stood side by side to view the spectacle helped to
intensify the impact even more.
Along with the Fish House and the Jardin
d’Acclimatation, the short-lived Viennese Aquarium
Salon, established in 1860 by Gustav Jäger, was one
of the first public aquariums in Europe. Jäger, whose
name means “hunter” in German, was an entrepre-
neur in many fields. At one point he became well-
known for his design of natural woolen clothing and
was therefore called “the wool hunter;” his clothing
was sold through subsidiaries of the Austrian company
Benger and could be found in stores across Paris, Lon-
don, and New York. In 1854, when the Semmering rail-
road was completed, giving Vienna convenient access
to the Mediterranean Sea, Jäger became an avid
marine enthusiast. By 1858 he had begun experiment-
ing with small saltwater aquariums, and within two
more years, he managed to open aquariums to the
public. Sadly, the venture could not sustain itself, and
in four short years Jäger’s salon shut its doors.
In 1865 Die Gartenlaube stated that the Marine
Aquarium Temple at the Zoological Garden in Ham-
burg, an “Ocean Fairy Castle,” outshone the London

­­104
Fish House. “The temple of arts, the studio for the Fish transport
exhibition and culture of aquaristic life” consisted of over the Alps via
the Semmering
a salon with two galleries and ten large glass tanks at railroad in the
its center, which was surrounded by more tanks in late 1850s
various directions.
According to the Temple’s commemorative book-
let it was an overwhelming joy to observe the “silent
inhabitants of the ocean” while they were “gracefully
and magnificently resting, weightlessly swimming,
vividly playing, cunningly lurking or eagerly fighting.”
Water circulated through the basins, then was dis-
charged, cleaned, and aerated. Photosynthesis was
easy to observe, as described in Die Gartenlaube:
Like row after row of air bubbles ascending from
a glass of champagne, merry bubbles of liberated oxy-
gen fizz from the light-drenched plants at the bottom
of the tanks like delicate chains of diamonds. The
wonderful creatures therein enjoy this bubbly air
champagne and wave and coquet in a tipsy manner
with their colorful feather-like tails and gesticulate
with their numerous snatching fingers or fly and whiz
between the grottos and caves like merry boys running
home from school.

­­105
Cross section A very small, easily overlooked footnote pointed
of the Hamburg out, however, that this perfectly constructed aquar-
aquarium, 1865
ium was not suitable for common fish like herring
or mackerel, which were certain to die within their
first day in the tanks. Conclusion: “How little is
man able to mimic, what nature accomplishes
with ease.”
As more public aquariums were constructed,
new methods and visions were set forth. Aquarium
architects wanted to guide the audience’s fantasies
by making not only the tanks look like small rocky
landscapes and grottos, but also the exhibition rooms
themselves. The grotto fashion was a throwback to
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, where the
Boboli Gardens in Florence once thrived. The grotto
style was to enjoy a powerful renaissance under the
forthcoming eclecticism, with one important differ-
ence: this time, rather than the grotto itself as the
center of attention, it now only served as a facade for
the main attraction. The visitors strolled through the
ancient grotto and had a glance at the oceanic dream
world and the future. The excitement of the “living
Diorama” was increased by the new experience of a
simulated ocean bed. The grottos had connotations of

­­106
Cross section of the
saltwater aquarium at
the 1900 Paris World’s
Fair, constructed by
A. and H. Guillaume

Previous page:
Salon aquarium

­­108
coral reefs, which are in fact not much more than a The All-around
huge accumulation of dead animal bodies. aquarium at the
World Exposition
In this field the French were the leading nation. in Paris, 1867
The new concept of big aquariums with several grot-
tos was first realized in 1866 on the Boulevard Mont-
martre in Paris and one year later at the Champ de
Mars for the World Exposition. The special attrac-
tion at these expositions was a room with a ceiling
made completely of glass, allowing the audience to
look straight up and observe the activities in the basin
above, as if they were at the bottom of the ocean.
This was, at least, the idea. In reality, the experience
must have been less impressive. When Jules Verne’s
fantasies about the submarine world were supposed
to become reality at the third World Exposition in
Paris in 1878, the Berlin councilman Dr. Ernst Frie-
del commented that the structure seemed “artificial
and uncomfortable—you almost dislocate your neck
in this fatal position and see absolutely nothing since
the fish hate to be viewed from below.” What is more,
this “ceiling aquarium” was not covered over, which
meant that its surface could be churned up by the
wind and rain. Nearly 20,000 gallons of water above
the observers’ heads—what a risky attempt! What

­­109
consequences would a crack in the glass have had,
not only for the fish, but also for the visitors?
Another grotto aquarium was built in Berlin, in 1867.
It was planned as an incorporated enterprise, and its
founding committee, which consisted of the German
zoologist Alfred Brehm, two bankers, a civil servant,
an author, and a constructor, asked the citizens of Ber-
lin to buy shares worth 200,000 German thalers (the
equivalent of 150,000 dollars at the time). A two-story
aquarium was built on the centrally located Unter
den Linden/Schadowstrasse between the fire walls
of the surrounding buildings. It was a strange, eccen-
tric complex: nothing could be seen from the outside,
not even a single window; daylight only entered the
building through the roof. During the first few years,
gas lamps gave off a little light. Natural stone from
nearby mountainous regions were used to cover the
archlike grottos. In May 1869 the aquarium was offi-
cially opened in the presence of King Wilhelm I. The
newspaper Vossische Zeitung quoted his reaction:
“Although the queen had informed me of the aquar-
ium, my expectations have by far been surpassed.” The
fifty show tanks held approximately 27,000 gallons of
water. In the meantime researchers had gained expe-
rience in the artificial production of salt water. The
ready-made element entered a well-designed circula-
tion system: water was brought via centrifugal pumps
from the cistern in the cellar into the reservoir, which
was located approximately fifty feet above the ground.
From there, the water flowed through pipes, where
it was mixed with air, into the basins. The drained-
off water returned to the cistern after it had been
channeled through a pebble stone and sand filter.
The glass panels of the water basins on the first
floor looked like random breakthroughs in the rock.
A fish hatchery was set up on a staircase-like grotto
making it possible to follow the metamorphosis from
egg to young fish with the help of different brood

­­110
tanks. And there was more to the menagerie than Cross section
aquatic animals: birds, reptiles, and mammals were of the Berlin
aquarium, 1869
all part of the program. Brehm wanted to recreate a
trek from the desert, through the jungle, culminating
at the ocean. The Deutsche Bauzeitung commended
the grotto style:
Despite the inventive, naturalistic design of the whole,
hardly anything seems to have been searched for or
fashioned, not as artificially forced decoration; every-
thing we see appears to have grown organically, to be
self-evolved.
Retrospectively, the reporter Dorothee Goebeler
recalled in 1907 in a Berlin newspaper her memory of
the fantastic pictures on leaving the aquarium:
I did not pay attention to my steps, in my ears I heard
the quiet sound of the sea, I saw the rising tide and the
foaming surf; right in front of me was an unfamiliar
world in motion, it was swimming in front of my eyes
like a kaleidoscope, the ocean shone for miles around
with electrical light, fish criss-crossed the green sea,
lobsters and octopuses moved around, and the brown
anemone waved and brought me back to the subma-
rine meadow where the sea anemones silently bloom.

­­111
Three illustra-
tions of the Berlin
aquarium, 1869.
The hall with the
staircase

More than one hundred thousand visitors passed

through the Berlin aquarium in the first three months.
But significant problems quickly arose: glass panels
burst under the enormous pressure; rats inhabited the
hollow space behind the grotto walls; the salt water
eroded pipes and pumps; finally, the life expectancy
of the animals was very short and there were logisti-
cal problems with restocking. Like other show aquari-
ums, the operation was not very lucrative. Its survival
could only be secured through additional activities
such as presenting a gorilla, selling artificially pro-

­­112
duced salt water, or leasing reservoirs to neighborhood Tour of the sea
delicatessens for keeping lobsters and trout. aquarium

Although Phineas Barnum had already set up a

small aquarium in his American Museum in 1856, the
first permanent installation in the United States was
the Great New York Aquarium, thanks to the commit-
ment of the businessman William Cameron Coup,
a former employee of Barnum’s American Circus,
where he was responsible for the advertising cam-
paigns and the transportation of visitors to the show. The basalt group

­­113
Exterior of the
New York Aquari-
um by night

After Coup saw the newly built public aquariums of

Europe in 1872, he proposed setting up an aquarium
in the middle of Central Park and charging a small
admission fee during the first years. Unfortunately, the
Park Commission decided against the idea because
the commercial use was not in accordance with their
understanding and definition of public space. Unde-
terred, Coup acquired a property on the corner of
Thirty-fifth Street and Broadway and teamed up with
Charles Reiche & Brother, importers of rare animals.
The New York Aquarium opened in 1876.
Children and adults paid an admission fee of 25
and 50 cents, respectively, to enter the aquarium,
which also included a library and reading room as
well as a “naturalist’s workshop” with microscopes
and dissecting tables. Admission also included a con-
cert that served as background music. The exhibition
tanks were located on street level, while the engine
and pump rooms as well as fresh and marine water
reservoirs were housed in the basement. In the center
of the exhibition hall sat a circular tank, thirty feet in
diameter and eight feet high, known as “the prison
house of the whale,” although it was typically used
for alligators. Windows of plate glass four feet high
and three feet wide were set into its sides. A seal tank
occupying a space roughly equivalent in size was also

­­114
 Interior of the
New York
Aquarium

present but, as these creatures were to be viewed

from above, its sides were solid masonry. Sharks,
skate, large surf bass, and similar marine creatures
lived in a sixty-five-foot saltwater tank, while more
fresh- and saltwater species were housed in a number
of other moderately large tanks. In one, anemones,
sponges, porgies, hermit crabs, and flounders could
be found while another contained California salmon
and lake and brook trout. A highlight of the aquarium
was a rockery and pool area for sea lions.
The tanks were also equipped with the most mod-
ern aeration system of the period: a steam air-pump
pushed air into the tanks, which was then fed through
tubes made of india rubber hidden amongst the rocks
and pebbles. Salt water was regularly delivered on a
specially equipped steamer from beyond Sandy Hook,
New Jersey. These transports were especially produc-
tive as the steamer stopped at different locations on
the return journey to pick up animals that fishermen
had caught according to prior instructions.
A major attraction at the aquarium was the pres-
ence of whales, which Scribner’s Monthly called “in
itself evidence of the energy and zeal of the man-
ager.” The task of bringing one in was, as one might
guess, quite a challenge. In order to catch them, the
whales were trapped in a deep bay close to the ocean.

­­115
 The strait was virtually sealed off
by erecting poles along a two-mile
stretch. During high tide the poles
were submerged below the water,
allowing the whales to swim into the
bay but trapping them after the tide
subsided. The animals were then
placed in wooden boxes that were
stuffed with algae and transported
into the city on special boats, wagons,
and trains.
In addition to permanent aquarium
Releasing the buildings, temporary constructions
whale into the
aquarium
were set up for world expositions and industrial and
national exhibitions, such as the complex aquariums
erected at the 1883 International Fisheries Exhibi-
tion in London, or the underground stone grotto
aquarium displayed at the Swiss National Exhibition
in Zurich the same year, which welcomed its visitors
with a pleasant chill and only contained fish from
Swiss lakes and rivers. The tanks were arranged next
to each other on both sides of a long room, the light
entering from above.
The running of a public aquarium was usually so
expensive that its permanent operation was in most
cases only profitable in combination with other activi-
ties. Often it had to be subsidized with typical fun-
fair attractions like magicians, jugglers, or unusual
Aquarium at the
Swiss National animals. Sometimes its location was the reason for a
Exhibition visit: an aquarium opened in 1872
in the seaside resort of Brigh-
ton, on the English south coast,
with its splendid hotels and a
new railway link to London, was
so conveniently located at the
boardwalk entrance that numer-
ous visitors could not resist the
temptation and had to have a

­­116
look at the 132,000-gallon main tank. The architec- The Brighton
tural design was most peculiar: London architect Aquarium with
its characteristic
Eugenius Birch, a designer of marine piers, created clock tower
a structure reminiscent of a church in Venetian-
Florentine “neo-trecento-style.” In the large entrance
hall and lining the 224-foot-long corridor were fish
tanks in archways leading up to a vaulted ceiling
supported by columns of polished red Edinburgh
granite and green serpentine marble, with pillars of
Bath stone and a mosaic flooring. Each one of the
tanks were to be found in a kind of chapel, where
the aquatic space behind the glass recalled an altar.
The underwater landscapes were made of porous tufa
to give the impression they had been transplanted
directly from the Devonshire coast. The wide corri-
dor led to a conservatory that had an attractive grotto
complete with a cascade of water. Outside, the court-
yard had five terra-cotta arches supported by pillars
enriched with carvings of mermaids, sea nymphs, and
other marine symbols. The small clock tower empha-
sizing the entrance of the structure became famous
all over the world. Although the building was far from
ready, it was decided to open on Easter Saturday 1872

­­117
The Stazione
Zoologica
in Naples,
around 1874

with the idea that the official opening would take

place the following August, when the premises were
to be completed. Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince
Arthur, arrived in Brighton that Easter with Prince
Edward of Saxe-Weimar. The Royal Party expressed
a wish to see the new aquarium and it was necessary
to carry out immediate work on the roadway so that
they and their ladies could enter the aquarium with-
out sinking up to their ankles in mud. With flags fly-
ing, the princes enjoyed their visit, pausing to view all
the specimens. The press described this impromptu
opening as “very propitious,” declaring that “it could
scarcely have entered the minds of any of the most
sanguine of the Aquarium directors that its opening
would be attended by a Prince of the Blood Royal.”
The fanfare was a harbinger of the aquarium’s success:
later on, the arrival of an octopus caused nearly as
much fuss as when a foreign king came to town, and
the death of a porpoise evoked as much grief as a
national catastrophe.

Scientific endeavors called for a different aquarium

type. Marine biological stations were located directly
at the coast and were equipped for research interests.
In 1874 the Stazione Zoologica opened in Naples,
Italy; its tuff building also contained several functional

­­118
aquarium tanks. The scientists’ studies were located Marine research
in the upper part of the building. There were also lab- base, Woods Hole

oratories, conservation rooms for the marine animals,

and an extensive library. Founded by Anton Dohrn, a
contemporary German supporter of Charles Darwin’s
controversial theory, the renowned complex was filled
with the sound of many different languages, as gov-
ernments from around the world sent their scientists
there; German, Italian, British, Russian, Belgian,
Swiss, Dutch, and American researchers experimented
on a daily basis with the marine creatures they caught
themselves or that were offered to them by local
fishermen.
In the United States, the model of the Stazione
Zoologica was copied by Spencer Fullerton Baird,
founder of the U.S. Fish Commission. He wanted to
create a place for marine biologists to systematically
study the sea over a long period of time. Until then,
only the Coast Survey’s short cruises with the Swiss
scientist and naturalist Louis Agassiz (who came to
America in 1847 and later founded the Museum of
Comparative Zoology at Harvard University) or the
Navy’s occasional multipurposed expeditions pro-
duced marine zoological collections. Finally, in 1884
and 1885, two large houses were constructed in Woods
Hole, Massachusetts, at Fullerton Baird’s instigation.
Amongst other things, these houses also contained a
public aquarium.

­­119
 Once they had learned how to handle the pressure
differences and cope with decompression sickness,
more and more scientists started to descend to the
depths of the ocean themselves. Analyzing the ani-
mals’ body structures under a microscope in the labo-
ratory was just one facet of their work. In order to
more thoroughly understand the complex ecosystem
of the ocean, it seemed wiser to do on-site research.
Indeed, the legendary argonaut researcher Jeannette
Power had foreseen the limitations of the aquarium
for scientific purposes already in the 1860s:
If one believes that it is possible to discover
interesting facts about marine animals with the help
of aquariums situated in living rooms or gardens,
in cities which are far away from the ocean, one
is mistaken.
With the possibilities of deep-sea diving and photog-
A photographer raphy (and later filming) the function of the aquarium
on the ocean bed underwent a profound change. Now that the richness
of the underwater world came
into focus, the provision-
ary nature of the aquarium
became apparent. For sci-
entists, it was now merely a
tool. However, it continued to
serve its purpose of entertain-
ing, educating, and distract-
ing the public, in short: a new
kind of theater.

­­120
 Th e A qu a riu m a s a D re a m

The idea for this book arose after finding a children’s

book, which was believed to have been lost, in a
Berlin library. In 1869 the then well-known German
satirist Adolf Glassbrenner published Reise in’s Meer:
Ein Aquarium für die wissbegierige Jugend (Journey in
the Ocean: An Aquarium for the Young and Inquisi-
tive) under his penname Julius Reymhold. The book
tells the story of a frog and a tur-
tle that make their way across the The dream is the aquarium of the night.
ocean. During their journey they —Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de la
mer, 1866
not only come across miscellane-
ous animals and plants, but also
signs that humans have left behind. First, a subma-
rine cable that stretches from one country to another,
then a shipwreck and a submarine. At the end of their
journey they get caught in a dragnet by a diver who
has descended into the abyss in a massive bell, and
they are taken to the marketplace. Their ocean jour-
ney abruptly terminated, they are sent home, right
back where they started from. The last illustration of
this book shows the reminiscing frog and the turtle
sitting on the rim of a grotto aquarium:
When nobody can hear and nobody can see, then they
sing with glee:
All the hustle, all the bustle
How sweet is the sea!

­­121
Journey in the
Ocean, title page

Through the coral halls,

And the blue paradise!
Where the jellyfish are crystal-like,
And the fish swim merrily;
There lives the beautiful anemone,
—Oh, how beautiful is the sea!
Nostalgia and grief over the loss of the ocean world
were part of the aquarium experience. In its magic
hour, the aquarium was an adventure. The scien-
tist, the collector, the aquarist took marine creatures
from nature and put them into a new order, either
in the laboratory or in the living room. The ocean
came home. At the same time, scientists started
systematic analyses of marine life. Until then, the

­­122
In the empire of shells
The glowing of the ocean
The diving bell
submarine world had been terra incognita, around
which wild speculations and fantasies had been
woven. The original saltwater aquarium tamed these
thoughts and quenched the thirst for this strange
world. It compressed them into an easily compre-
hended menagerie, an oceanic garden in miniature,
a submarine chamber of wonders. The mysteries and
conundrums of the ocean were projected onto the
aquarium, fueling its dynamism and popularity. At
first, it was mainly filled with the invertebrate marine
animals—important for the theory of evolution—
but as people developed a taste for more action in
the aquarium and gained more knowledge about
owning and maintaining one, fish became more inter-
esting. Because it was easier to maintain a freshwater
aquarium, a second, “defused” type of aquarium
emerged.
Fads come and fads go, but ultimately the aquarium
stayed. This development was not a continuous pro-
cess, though. Many did not know how to solve the
technical problems, and the frequent changing of the
water became an annoyance. Early on in its develop-
ment, the hobby was largely given up and aquariums
vanished from living rooms.
But thanks to a number of dedicated aquarists in
the United States and Germany, things changed and
with the establishment of societies and the publish-
ing of magazines, the privately practiced aquarium
hobby developed its strongest dynamism. To the same
extent as the aquarium spread and became popular,
a small democratization of the knowledge of nature
occurred. The aquarium became one of the most
popular scientific tools but required not the slight-
est mathematical knowledge, distinguishing it from
physics and astronomy. Although afflicted with some
innate complications, the “ocean in a glass” came at
just the right time to suffice an ever-increasing lay-
man’s interest in nature.

­­126
 In the course of its development the aquarium
performed an astonishing functional evolution: while
still utilized as a scientific instrument for the likes
of Robert Warington and pioneers (“proto aquar-
ists”) such as Jeannette Power, Philip Henry Gosse
also used the aquarium for religious purposes; later,
after its arrival in Germany and the United States,
the aquarium became the primary medium for natu-
ral science education; soon it turned into a matter
for slipper-wearing hobby scientists, who very quickly
started passionate competitions to see who had the
most beautiful and rare fish. The aquarium developed
into a peculiar mix of business and popular science,
but even before the turn of the century it was clear
that its educational aspect was not nearly as popular
as the sheer joy and gained by owning exotic toy fish.
Parallel to this, the freshwater aquarium broke away
from the far-reaching associations of the submarine
world. In a sense, things came full circle: the popu-
larity and proliferation of the goldfish was a result
of early expeditions, leading to the invention of
aquariums for scientific purposes; as the aquarium
itself gained esteem the world over, ships once again
set sail, now in pursuit of exotic species under the
auspices of aesthetics rather than science.
During the aquarium’s transitional period from
private to public, its dimensions changed dramati-
cally, thus enabling completely new staging and
dramaturgy. The aquarium turned into a collective
experience, comparable to those at funfairs, national
exhibitions, and museums.
But everything could have been different. The jour-
nals of the late-nineteenth century—forerunners of
today’s aquarist magazines—published in London,
Paris, New York, Washington, Boston, and Berlin,
overflowed with “ground-breaking” inventions. At
second glance the “ocean on the table” did not really
seem to be any less of a paradox than the “foldable

­­127
birdcage,” “the electric walking-stick,” or
“the flying ship.” But because it suited the
period so well and was nourished by so
many different factors—financial inter-
ests, a booming fascination with natural An electric
science, oceans, and collecting, and the formation of walking stick,
manufactured
societies—this aquarium did not land in the attic like by the Viennese
so many of its contemporaries. Within a short period company Elektro-
technischen
of time, it became the topic par excellence, effectively
Bureau. The bulb
picked up as a central theme in different discourses, at the end of the
and was legitimized. It did not, therefore, take long stick is protected
against damage
for it to become the most natural thing on earth. The
by a strong
wonders of the ocean and ponds were simply turned glass knob
into pets.
When writing about the history of the aquarium,
one should not forget the ecological repercussions
closely connected to the catching of marine animals.
Some pioneers suppressed the consequences of their
activities, while to this day there are marine-life advo-
cates speaking against the practice of capturing and
showcasing aquatic plants and animals for entertain-
ment or experiment.
Along the coastline, as Gosse described in his
books, the hunt for plants and animals caused real
devastation, and by the beginning of the twentieth
century the coastal landscape had completely
changed. In his book Seven Tenths, James Hamilton-
Paterson explicitly holds “zoology with strong reli-
gious tendencies” responsible for this development.
In 1907 Gosse’s son Edmund—in contrast to Philip,
a convinced Darwinist—put matters straight in his
biography of his father:
The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a
very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those cen-
turies solely in consequence of the indifference, the
blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed
by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellu-
cid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful

­­128
 sensitive forms of life,—they exist no longer, they are
all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarised. An army of
“collectors” has passed over them, and ravaged every
corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated,
the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection
has been crushed under the rough paw of well-
meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my father, him-
self so reverent, so conservative, had by the popular-
ity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a
calamity that he had never anticipated, became clear
enough to himself before many years had passed, and
cost him great chagrin.
Despite all efforts the saltwater aquarium remained
a game of naturalness against artificiality, a material-
ized but unavoidably incomplete dream of the ocean.
It also functioned as a souvenir from a period before
the ocean became exposed to the exploitation of
humans. Its innate idea, going back to Gosse’s mari-
time “Noah’s Ark,” already included the imminent
danger of the destruction of the ocean 150 years ago
when The Aquarium was published. At the same time,
the inhabitants of the aquarium are manifestations of
a dream of overcoming time, since fish, jellyfish, and
other marine creatures have existed for millions of
years and hardly changed.
In contrast to the majority of toy fish for fresh-water
aquariums, marine animals (despite considerable
improvements in the supply of plankton) are still very
difficult to breed. Most of them are caught without
consideration and sometimes with the use of toxic
chemicals such as cyanide. The complicated ecosys-
tem of the coral reefs is simply paid no mind. More
than half of the fish are already dead before they are
even loaded onto a cargo plane to Europe, the United
States, or Japan. In spite of all the warnings, the trade
with imported fish from the Philippines, Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands is still boom-
ing. Different institutions give varying figures: today,

­­129
fish are the second most popular pets in the United
States (after cats, but before dogs). The catching of
colorful, tropical saltwater fish is a lucrative business.
In 2000, two-and-a-half pounds of aquarium fish
from the Maldives were worth five hundred dollars,
the same amount of food fish only six. According to a
global UN study from 2003, more than twenty million
tropical fish are caught per year for trade purposes
in Europe and the United States, aside from up to
twelve million corals. Some marine-water aquarists
have mixed feelings when it comes to nature conser-
vation: on the one hand they complain and condemn
environmental damage or losses, but on the other
hand they often tend to forget about the negative
consequences of their hobby.
The desire to collect and create a miniature world
remains still today. But the preconditions are differ-
ent now, and not only due to awareness of ecological
consequences. The understanding of what the highly
complex ecosystem really is has changed; it is no lon-
ger characterized by the naïveté of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Passionate aquarists today try to determine which
organizing principle a collection responds to, why
exactly certain objects belong to one collection and not
others. Maybe one day the carefully arranged minia-
ture parlors, snow globes, and living room aquariums
in which a peaceful and intact world is simulated, will
vanish. Until then, the Bonsai oceans and lakes live
their life as a naïve-ironical accessory in an apartment
decorated with lava lamps and hardoy chairs.
Aquarium, Aquarius: a new era has begun. Be it in
Monterey, Bournemouth, Okinawa, Sydney, Genoa,
or Barcelona—today ultra-modern oceanariums set
the tone and show the way to a more authentic, “real-
life” view of marine animals. Nevertheless, the con-
struction of “nature” in an artificial framework is still
afflicted with distinctive contradictions arising from
the interaction of economic interests, preservation,

­­130
and educational demands, as Susan Davis has im-
pressively analyzed in her book Spectacular Nature:
Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. Irre-
spective of this, the oceanariums of the twenty-first
century continue the legacy of the aquarium. The
oceanariums are the extreme, radicalized form of the
good old aquarium, where thoughts unfold of a new
utopian ideal.
The beginning of these big aquaristic submarine
gardens, the oceanariums, can be traced back to a
facility built in 1937 at Marineland, in St. Augustine,
Florida. It was originally designed only for making
underwater films, but soon the marine mammals
displayed in a gigantic tank surrounded by aquari-
ums attracted many visitors. Today, the difference
between aquariums and oceanariums can best be
studied in Lisbon, Portugal, where the Aquário Vasco
da Gama, which opened in 1898, is located. One look
is enough to tell that the small building has seen bet-
ter days. Inside it is narrow and sticky, and everybody
who is not completely indifferent must feel pity for
the large ocean turtles that vegetate here on a few
plates of concrete. The selling of “take-away” fish
makes the place even more pathetic. The situation
in the Oceanário, located several miles east on the
site of the 1998 World Exhibition, is completely dif-
ferent. The inventive building in the shape of a cube
is located directly on the banks of the River Tejo
and does not only contain a gigantic tank that can
be seen from different sides and multiple levels, but
also enables visitors to experience the climate, ani-
mal kingdom, and vegetation of different regions in
four different zones. Young and old stroll through the
silent halls separated from sharks and rays by only a
thin glass wall. Here, one gets the impression that
the marine animals are also observing the humans.
It is the perfect place to remember the British artist
and naturalist Henry Noel Humphreys’s prophetic

­­131
words about the aquarium in Ocean Gardens, pub-
lished in 1857:
In its present form, it is only a ornamental; but the
time will come when we shall have immense crystal-
walled seas, covering acres of ground, like the crystal
palaces of the present, in which the whale, the shark,
and other titans of the deep, will disport themselves
with their natural enemies, for the amusement and
edification of man.
Which utopia will follow the oceanarium? Maybe
in the not too distant future humans will decide to
move into the ocean. Often enough, they have spun
dreams about it and even created architectural plans
for submarine palaces. If this were to happen, the last
phase of the aquarium’s design history would bring
about a complete reversal of the relationship between
humans and the ocean: no longer would the swimming
pool be the only aquarium for humans, but the ocean
itself would perform this role. Until such a day arrives,
we’ll have to make do with our provisional ocean
at home.

­­132
 A ppe n dix
Acknowle dg ments

This book did not become reality overnight and would

probably not even exist had it not been for a sponta-
neous and wonderful conversation with Nettie Aljian
from Princeton Architectural Press in Frankfurt am
Main in fall 2003. The German version of this book
soon landed on the desk and in the competent hands
of Nicola Bednarek, editor at Princeton Architectural
Press in New York City. She is also the person who
gave me constructive help for a revision of the origi-
nal version. Scott Tennent then did a truly great job
copyediting the English translation.
I would also like to thank the many people who
have supported me during this project. First of all,
Gudrun Fröba and Rainer Nitsche from transit
Buchverlag, who published the German edition;
Hannelore Landsberg from the Natural History
Museum in Berlin, who established some important
contacts and helped me in the institute’s library;
Stanley H. Weitzman, Curator of Fishes at the Smith-
sonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who sent me
valuable documents; Anke te Heesen from the Max-
Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin,
who not only had time for an interesting discussion
but also arranged some important contacts; and René

­­133
E. Honegger from Zurich, who very kindly put me in
contact with Paul van den Sande from the European
Union of Aquarium Curators in Antwerp.
I also wish to thank Hans-Albert Pederzani, who
introduced me to Werner Rieck. Werner Rieck, a
self-confessed aquarist and herpetologist, allowed me
to use the library of the Triton society and supplied
me with the otherwise unobtainable but marvelous
book on fish transport by Paul Nitsche. I am grate-
ful to Claude Arnal from Juillac/France, who pro-
vided information on Jeannette Power de Villepreux
and patiently answered all of my questions; Peter R.
Gilder from Arts and Designs of Japan in San Fran-
cisco, who provided the Japanese illustration on page
22; and Lee Finley, who sent me a copy of the first
American book on aquaria. I would like to express my
thanks to Frank Eyssen and Stephan Gollasch from
the Hamburg Ozeanhaus project, Anna Bernhard,
Ann Thwaite, Emma C. Spary, Rebecca Stott, Albert
Klee, David C. Allen, Harro Strehlow, Michael Tolks-
dorf, Daphne G. Fautin, Sabine Hackethal, Ursula
Harter, and James Hamilton-Paterson.
And many thanks to my friends Detlef Feussner,
Beate Heine, Ana Tipa, and Ulrich Meyer with whom
I discussed this project, and to Annette Kaiser, who
helped me solve technical problems. Last but not
least, to Ashley Marc Slapp for translating this book
into English.

­­134
 Selected Bibliography

Allen, David Elliston. The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
———. “Tastes and Crazes.” In Cultures of Natural History, edited
by Nicholas Jardine, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996.
“The Aquarium.” In The North American Review, July 1858, 143–57.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press,
1993.
Baratay, Eric, and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Zoo: A History of Zoo-
logical Gardens in the West. London: Reaktion Books, 2002.
Barber, Lynn. The Heyday of Natural History 1820–1870. New York:
Doubleday, 1980.
Bechstein, Johann Matthäus. Naturgeschichte der Stubenthiere.
Gotha: Ettinger’sche Buchhandlung, 1797.
Butler, Henry D. The Family Aquarium; or, Aqua Vivarium: A New
Pleasure for the Domestic Cirle: Being a Familiar and Complete
Instructor upon the Subject of the Construction, Fitting-Up, Stock-
ing, and Maintenance of the Fluvial and Marina Aquaria, or “River
and Ocean Gardens.” New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1858.
“Colman’s ‘European Life and Manners.’” In The American Whig
Review, August 1849, 159–76.
Coomans, Henry E. “Conchology before Linnaeus.” In The Origins
of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Sev-
enteenth-Century Europe, edited by Oliver Impey, et al. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985.
Corbin, Alain. Lure of the Sea. The Discovery of the Seaside in the
Western World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
“Customs and Manners under the Water.” In The Living Age,
August 26, 1854, 414–16.
Damon, William E. Ocean Wonders: A Companion for the Seashore;
Freely Illustrated from Living Objects. New York: Appleton, 1879.
Daum, Andreas W. Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhun-
dert. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998.
Davis, Susan. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea
World Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Delumeau, Jean. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt
Culture 13th–18th Centuries. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Drouin, Jean-Marc, and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. “Nature for
the People.” In Cultures of Natural History, edited by Nicholas
Jardine, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Edwards, Arthur M. Life Beneath the Waters; or, The Aquarium in
America. New York: H. Baillière, 1858.
“Fish-Culture in America.” In Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
November 1868, 731–39.
Frey, Hans. Das Aquarium von A bis Z. Radebeul: Verlag J. Neu-
mann-Neudamm, 1957.
Gage, Matilda Joslyn. “Woman as an Inventor.” In The North Ameri-
can Review. May 1883, 478–90.

­­135
Gautier, Théophile. Paris et les parisiens. Paris: Boîte à documents,
1996.
Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1948.
Glade, Heinz. Das Rätsel der blauen Scalare: Von Fischen und
Züchtern. Berlin: Buchverlag Der Morgen, 1966.
Glaschker, A. Jubiläums-Katalog. Leipzig, 1925. Self-published.
Glaser, Hermann. Industriekultur und Alltagsleben. Vom Biedermeier
zur Postmoderne. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994.
Gosse, Edmund. The Life of Philip Henry Gosse. London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trübner, 1890.
———. Father and Son. New York: W. W. Norton, 1907.
Gosse, Philip Henry. A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast.
London: John Van Voorst, 1853.
———. The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep
Sea. London: John Van Voorst, 1854.
“Gosse’s Aquarium.” In The Living Age, August 26, 1854, 229–30.
Gould, Stephen Jay. “Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly.”
In Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms. London:
Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1998.
Hamilton-Paterson, James. Seven Tenths. London: Hutchinson,
1992.
Heesen, Anke te. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-
century Picture Encyclopedia. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002.
Hervey, George Frangopulo, and Jack Hems. The Goldfish. London:
The Batchworth Press, 1948.
Hibberd, Shirley. Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste. London:
Groomsbridge and Sons, 1856.
Hoffmann, Reinhold Eduard. Seewasser-Aquarien im Zimmer. Mag-
deburg: Creutz, 1886.
Humphreys, H. Noel. Ocean Gardens: The History of the Marine
Aquarium, and the Best Methods Now Adopted for Its Establishment
and Preservation. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1858.
Jäger, Gustav. Das Leben im Wasser und das Aquarium. Stuttgart:
Franckh, 1868.
Jahn, Ilse, ed. Geschichte der Biologie. Heidelberg: Spektrum Aka-
demischer Verlag, 2000.
Keller, Conrad. Das Leben des Meeres. Leipzig: Hermann Tauchnitz,
1895.
Keller, Otto. Die antike Tierwelt. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm
Engelmann, 1913.
Kisling, Vernon N., Jr. (Ed.). Zoo and Aquarium History: Ancient
Animal Collections to Zoological Gardens. Boca Raton, London,
New York, Washington, D.C.: CRC Press, 2001.
Klee, Albert J. The Toy Fish: A History of the Aquarium Hobby in
America—The First One-Hundred Years. Pascoag: Finley Aquatic
Books, 2003.
Leeuwen, Thomas A. P. The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate His-
tory of the Swimming Pool. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.

­­136
“Literary Notices” (review of “Life Beneath the Waters; or, The
Aquarium in America”). In The Atlantic Monthly, September
1858, 509.
Lloyd, William Alford. A List with Descriptions, Illustrations and
Prices of Whatever Relates to Aquaria. London: 1858. Self-pub-
lished.
———. “Aquaria: Their Past, Present, and Future.” In American
Naturalist, October 1876, 611–21.
Lutz, Karl Georg. Das Süsswasser-Aquarium und das Leben im Süss-
wasser. Stuttgart: Hänselmann, 1886.
Mangin, Arthur. Der Ocean, seine Geheimnisse und Wunder. Berlin:
Schlingmann 1866.
———. Les Jardins, l’histoire et descriptions. Paris: Alfred Mame et
fils, 1867.
Marshall, William. Die Tiefsee und ihr Leben. Leipzig: Hirt, 1888.
———. Die deutschen Meere und ihre Bewohner. Leipzig: Twiet-
meyer, 1895.
Mostar, Herrmann. Die Arche Mostar von ihm selbst gezimmert:
Geschichte der Stubentiere und die Stubentiere in der Geschichte.
Stuttgart: Henry Goverts Verlag, 1959.
Mulertt, Hugo. The Goldfish and Its Systematic Culture with a View
to Profit. Brooklyn: Hugo Mulertt, 1883.
“My Aquarium.” In The Atlantic Monthly, February 1858, 426–31.
New England Aquarium (Old Aquariums). http://www.neaq.org/
about/history/1885.html (“Boston Aquarial Gardens”)
Nitsche, Paul. Der Import von lebenden Fischen. Berlin: Selbstverlag
des Verfassers, in Kommission bei Fritz Pfenningstorff, Berlin,
Verlag für Sport und Naturliebhaberei, 1901.
Ocean, The: A Description of the Wonders and Important Products of
the Sea. New York: G. Lane and P. Sanford, 1884.
Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch
Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
“The Parlor Aquarium.” In The Living Age, August 14, 1852, 335.
Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1991.
Rebière, Alphonse. “Madame Power, une naturaliste oubliée.” Bul-
letin de la Société des Lettres, Sciences et Arts de la Corrèze 21
(1899): 303–329.
Rehbock, Philip F. “The Victorian Aquarium in Ecological and
Social Perspective.” In Oceanography: The Past, edited by Mary
Sears and Daniel Merriman. New York, Heidelberg, Berlin:
Springer Verlag, 1980.
Reymhold, Julius. Die Reise in’s Meer: Ein Aquarium für die wiss-
begierige Jugend. Berlin: Verlag von A. Hofmann & Co., 1869.
Rieck, Werner, ed. Mertensiella: Die Geschichte der Herpetologie
und Terrarienkunde im deutschsprachigen Raum. Rheinbach:
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Herpetologie und Terrarienkunde,
2001.
Rossmässler, Emil Adolf. Das Süsswasseraquarium. Leipzig: Verlag
Hermann Mendelsohn, 1857.

­­137
Schlee, Susan. The Edge of an Unfamiliar World: A History of Ocean-
ography. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973.
Schleiden, Matthias Jacob. Das Meer. Berlin: A. Sacco Nachfolger, 1867.
“The Smithsonian Aquarium at Washington.” In Scientific Ameri-
can, December 19, 1857, 113.
Sonrel, Léon. Le fond de la mer. Paris: Hachette, 1868.
Spary, E. C. “Codes der Leidenschaft: Französische Vogelsammlun-
gen als eine Sprache der vornehmen Gesellschaft im 18. Jahr-
hundert.” In Sammeln als Wissen, ed. by Heesen, Anke te und
Spary, E. C. Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2001.
Steele, John H., et al. Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences. London:
Academic Press, 2001.
Stott, Rebecca. “Through a Glass Darkly: Aquarium Colonies and
Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Marine Monstrosity.” Gothic
Studies 2, no. 3 (2000).
———. Theatres of Glass: The Woman Who Brought the Sea to the
City. London: Short Books, 2003.
Thomson, Charles Wyville. The Depths of the Sea. London: Macmil-
lan and Company, 1873.
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. Science and the Classics. London:
Oxford University Press, 1940.
Thorndike, Joseph J. Mysteries of the Deep. New York: American
Heritage Publishing Co., 1980.
Thwaite, Anne. Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry
Gosse. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.
Wabnitz, Colette, et al. From Ocean to Aquarium: The Global Trade
in Marine Ornamental Species; United Nations Environment Pro-
gram’s World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC
Biodiversity Series No. 17). (Cambridge, UK: 2003) document
available on the Internet: www.unep-wcmc.org/resources/publi-
cations/WCMC_Aquarium.pdf
Ward, W. S. “The New York Aquarium.” In Scribner’s Monthly,
March 1877, 577–92.
West, R. A. Fresh and Salt-water Aquaria: Report of the Commis-
sioner of Agriculture for the Year 1864. Washington, D.C.: Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1865.
Zernecke, Ernst. Leitfaden für Aquarien- und Terrarienfreunde.
Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle & Meyer, 1913.

Issues of the following magazines have been consulted:

Blätter für Aquarien- und Terrarienfreunde

Die Gartenlaube
Isis
Kosmos—Zeitschrift für alle angewandten Naturwissenschaften
Le magasin pittoresque
Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift

­­138
 Illustration Credits

Allen, David Elliston. The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994: pp. 19, 57
Amtlicher Bericht über die 40. Versammlung deutscher Naturfor-
scher und Ärzte. Hannover 1866: p. 13
Archive Claude Arnal: p. 29
Archive of the author: pp. 18, 59, 72, 105, 109, 116 bottom, 117
Archive Lee Finley: p. 101
Archive Albert Klee: pp. 73–76
Arts & Designs of Japan, San Francisco: p. 22
Barber, Lynn. The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870. New York:
Doubleday, 1980: p. 38
Bechstein, Johann Matthäus. Naturgeschichte der Stubenthiere.
Gotha: Ettinger’sche Buchhandlung, 1797: p. 27
Beebe, William. 923 Meter unter dem Meeresspiegel, Leipzig: Brock-
haus, 1932: p. 10
Blätter für Aquarien- und Terrarienfreunde, 1890: pp. 63, 92
Cassel’s Household Guide, 1870: p. 107
Deutsche Bauzeitung, 1869: pp. 111–113
Die Gartenlaube, 1865: pp. 61–62, 70, 106
Geyer, Wilhelm. Katechismus für Aquarienliebhaber. Magdeburg:
Creutz, 1892: p. 95 top
Glaschker, A. Jubiläums-Katalog. Leipzig, 1925. Self-published: p. 85
Gosse, Philip Henry. The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders
of the Deep Sea. London: John Van Voorst, 1854: pp. 34, 40–41,
43, 45, 51
Hartwig, Georg. Das Leben des Meeres. Glogau, np: 1862: pp. 26, 32
Hibberd, Shirley. Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste. London:
Groomsbridge and Sons, 1856: pp. 30, 88 middle
L’Illustration, Journal universel, 1860: p. 103
Jörg Klam Photography © Bernd Brunner: p. 143
Kearley, George. Links in the Chain; or Popular Chapters on the
Curiosities of Animal Life. London, 1862: p. 55
Keller, Conrad. Das Leben des Meeres. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1895: p. 58
Kosmos—Zeitschrift für alle angewandten Naturwissenschaften, 1859:
p. 90
Kuhn, Franz. Der kleine Goldfischteich. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1935:
p. 23
Lloyd, William Alford. A List with Descriptions, Illustrations and
Prices of Whatever Relates to Aquaria. London: 1858. Self-pub-
lished: pp. 56, 88 top
Le magasin pittoresque, 1855: pp. 88 bottom, 90, 102
Marshall, William. Die Tiefsee und ihr Leben. Leipzig: Hirt, 1888:
pp. 14 bottom, 46–47, 54
Mulertt, Hugo. The Goldfish and Its Culture. Brooklyn, 1883. Self-
published: pp. 79–80
Museum of the City of New York: p. 100
Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift, 1889: pp. 95 bottom, 128

­­139
Nitsche, Paul. Der Import von lebenden Fischen. Berlin: Selbstverlag
des Verfassers, in Kommission bei Fritz Pfenningstorff, Berlin,
Verlag für Sport und Naturliebhaberei, 1901: pp. 82–83
noaa Photo Library: p. 14 top
Rathbun, Richard. “The United States Fish Commission.” In The
Century, March 1892: p. 119
Reymhold, Julius. Die Reise in’s Meer: Ein Aquarium für die wissbe-
gierige Jugend. Berlin: Verlag von A. Hofmann & Co., 1869: pp.
122–125
Rossmässler, Emil Adolf. Das Süsswasseraquarium. Leipzig: Verlag
Hermann Mendelsohn, 1857: p. 65
“The Salt Water Aquarium at the Paris Exposition.” In: Scientific
American Supplement, No. 1300, December 1, 1900: p. 108
Scherpner, Christoph. Von Bürgern für Bürger. 125 Jahre Zoologischer
Garten Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt am Main, 1983: p. 87 top
Scherren, H. The Zoological Society of London. London: np, 1905:
p. 99
Schleiden, Matthias Jacob. Das Meer. Berlin: A. Sacco Nachfolger,
1867: pp. 12, 31, 33, 36, 49, 52–53
Thorndike, Joseph J. Mysteries of the Deep. New York: American
Heritage Pub., 1980: p. 11
Ward, W. S. “The New York Aquarium.” In Scribner’s Monthly,
March 1877: pp. 114–115, 116 top
Warmus, William, www.warmus.com: p. 67
Weekly Welcome, 1879: p. 98
Wiese, Josef. Das Meer. Berlin: A. Schall, 1907: p. 120
Wilcke, E. Aquarien und Terrarien. Duderstadt: Wagner, 1885: p. 94

­­140
 A Selection of Aquariums and Oceanariums

North America:
Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Aquarium,
www.cabq.gov/biopark/aquarium
Baltimore, MD: National Aquarium in Baltimore, www.aqua.org
Boston, MA: New England Aquarium, www.neaq.org
Camden, NJ: New Jersey State Aquarium, www.njaquarium.org
Chattanooga, TN: Tennessee Aquarium, www.tennis.org
Chicago, IL: Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, www.sheddaquarium.org
Corpus Christi, TX: Texas State Aquarium,
www.texasstateaquarium.org
Dallas, TX: The Dallas World Aquarium,
www.dwazoo.com/aquarium.html
Honolulu, HI: Waikiki Aquarium, University of Hawaii-Manoa,
www.waquarium.otted.hawaii.edu
Key West, FL: Key West Aquarium, www.keywestaquarium.com
La Jolla, CA: Birch Aquarium, http://aquarium.ucsd.edu
Long Beach, CA: Aquarium of the Pacific,
www.aquariumofpacific.org
Los Angeles, CA: Cabrillo Marine Aquarium,
www.cabrilloaq.org
Monterey, CA: Monterey Bay Aquarium, www.mbayaq.org
Myrtle Beach, SC: Ripley‘s Aquarium, www.ripleysaquarium.com
Newport, Kentucky: Newport Aquarium,
www.newportaquarium.com
San Francisco, CA: Steinhart Aquarium,
www.calacademy.org/aquarium
Seattle, WA: Seattle Aquarium, www.seattleaquarium.org
Vancouver, British Columbia: Aquarium Marine Science Center,
www.vanaqua.org

Europe
Barcelona, Spain: L‘Aqùarium de Barcelona,
www.aquariumbcn.com/
Berlin, Germany: Aquarium, www.aquarium-berlin.de
Bologne-sur-Mer, France: Nausicaä, Centre National de la Mer,
www.nausicaa.fr
Bournemouth, United Kingdom: The Bournemouth Aquarium,
www.oceanarium.co.uk
Brest, France: Oceanopolis, www.oceanopolis.com/
Genoa, Italy: Acquario di Genova, www.acquario.ge.it
Hamburg, Germany: Ozeanarium (planned), www.ozean.tv
Hull, United Kingdom: The Deep (Submarium),
www.thedeep.co.uk
La Rochelle, France: Aquarium de La Rochelle,
www.aquarium-larochelle.com
Lisbon, Portugal: Oceanário de Lisboa, www.oceanario.pt
London, United Kingdom: London Aquarium,
www.londonaquarium.co.uk

­­141
Naples, Italy: Acquario, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn,
www.szn.it
Plymouth, United Kingdom: National Marine Aquarium,
www.national-aquarium.co.uk
Stockholm, Sweden: Aquaria Vattenmuseum, www.aquaria.se
Stralsund, Germany: Aquarium Deutsches Meeresmuseum,
www.meeresmuseum.de
Tromsø, Norway: Polaria,
www.polaria.no/main/polaria_engelsk/default.htm
Valencia, Spain: L‘Oceanographic

Asia:
Enoshima, Japan: Enoshima Aquarium, www.enosui.com
Kagoshima City, Japan: Kagoshima City Aquarium
Osaka, Japan: Aquarium Kaiyukan, www.kaiyukan.com/eng
Okinawa, Japan: Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium

South Africa:
Cape Town: Two Oceans Aquarium, www.aquarium.co.za

Australia and New Zealand:

Canberra: Canberra Zoo and Aquarium, www.zooquarium.com.au
Hillarys: The Aquarium of Western Australia,
www.aqwa.com.au/main.asp
Melbourne: Melbourne Aquarium,
www.melbourneaquarium.com.au
Napier, New Zealand: National Aquarium of New Zealand,
www.nationalaquarium.co.nz
Sidney: Sidney Aquarium, www.sydneyaquarium.com.au
Townsville: Townsville Reef Aquarium, www.reefhq.org.au

­­142
 About the Author

Bernd Brunner is a writer and journalist. He attended

the Free University Berlin and the University of
Washington in Seattle and has worked for German
and French television. His interests include the rela-
tionship between man and nature, and the cultural
history of landscapes and technologies. You can find
him on the Web at www.berndbrunner.com.

­­143