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It took a long time before we were able to keep aquarium such as this at Monteray Bay aquarium

People have been keeping aquariums for a very long time and the practice can be traced atleast back to Roman Empire, the Chinese also started to keep gold carps in ornamental ponds and indoor display a long time ago (during the Tang Dynasty 618-907). The word aquarium is derived from latin and consists of the two words aqua, which most people know means water and the suffix -arium, which roughly means “a place for relating to”.

The word has stayed roughly the same in many languages around the world and can be understood in most languages and not just the romance languages that are based on latin such as Spanish and Italian. An example of this is the fact that the Dutch and German word for aquarium is, you guessed it, aquarium, and the Scandinavian languages Swedish, Danish and Norwegian have only altered the spelling a bit to Akvarium. The term aquarium can also be found with only smaller varitions in a lot of none European languages such as akuarium in Bahasa a Indonesian language and akwaryum in Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines.

Roman aquarium designers starting using glass panels in their aquariums around the year 50, before that the aquariums had been more like marble ponds. One of the first species of fish to be displayed in Roman aquariums was the sea barble. Chinese aquariums were usually made out of porcelain and they were so important that the emperor himself greated a company for the production of big goldfish tubs.

After the fall of the Roman Empire the aquarium became rare in Europe even though some people kept indoor aquariums and the aquarium didn’t get popular again until during the 19^th century. Around 1830 Dr Nathaniel Ward invented the Wardian case; a closely-fitted glazed wooden case that served as protection for sensitive ferns and a few years later he proposed to use his tanks to keep tropical animals. In the early 1840s Dr Ward started to experiment with keeping fish and aquatic plants in his boxes.

Another early example of aquarium keeping is from 1838 when French biologist Felix Dujardin noted owning a saltwater aquarium, although he did not use the term aquarium since it would take until 1854 before that name was introduced. The first cycled stable marine aquarium was managed by a Anna Thynne, a marine zoologist during the Victorian Era that kept stony corals and seeweed in her tank. She was the first one the discover that coral in the genus Madrepora (”mother of pores”) have 3 different ways of reproducing. In 1850, the Chemical Society journal published an article on the keeping of goldfish, snails and eelgrass together in a 13-gallon container a feat accomplished by agricultural chemist Robert Warington.

Aquarium keeping turned into a fashionable hobby in Victorian Britain, especially after the Great Exhibition of 1851 where an ornate cast iron framed aquaria was put on display. Two years after the exhibition, London Zoo opened the first large public aquarium in the world the Fish House.

I mentioned before that the term aquarium didn’t gain any widespread use before 1954 when Philip Henry Gosse used the term in his popular book “The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea”.