Home aquariums took off in 1850s Britain after Philip Gosse kept seawater fresh with seaweed

On May 3, 1852, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse put about three pints of seawater, some seaweeds and small sea animals into a confectioner’s show-glass about ten inches deep. He only topped it up to replace evaporation, yet the water stayed fresh and the animals healthy for more than two months, according to his son Edmund’s 1890 biography. The plants supplied oxygen in the light, a trick Gosse had already used in freshwater vases.¹

Others were close behind or ahead of him. The Horniman Museum notes that Robert Warington published the same finding about plants and animals living in balance, independently, in 1852, and that Sir John Dalyell had kept sea anemones alive for years in the 1820s by changing their seawater every day. Horniman also credits Gosse with coining the modern word aquarium.²

In December 1852 Gosse began setting up a tank in the new Fish House at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, stocked with about two hundred animals and plants collected in Devon. Its popularity persuaded the Zoological Society to make the new aquarium a feature of the gardens.¹

His 1854 book, The Aquarium, sold “like wild-fire.” Its color plates showed sea creatures among rocks and weed as they would look in a tank, and its last chapter told readers how to set one up at home, from the tank’s size and shape to where to place it for light.¹³

A craze followed. Horniman points to the 1845 repeal of the glass duty, which made plate glass cheaper, and London shops selling ready-made “parlour pond” tanks. The enthusiasm faded once many households found the tanks hard to look after. Public aquariums kept growing, though: the success of the zoo’s fish house, which opened in 1853, led to others in Britain, Europe and the United States over the next two decades.²