Mar

23

Book ‘Em: Sphere Of Influence.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 23, 2008 |

It’s often easy to forget that every man-made object around us was invented by someone. There are a few names that stand out, like Edison, or Daguerre, but there are a lot more that, for one reason or another, disappear into obscurity. Maybe that’s because some things seem so, well, natural, like the aquarium for instance. Aquariums have always been around, right? Actually they didn’t come into existence until the 1840’s, and, like a lot of inventions, were the product of necessity. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. They were invented because Anna Thynne’s curiosity made them a necessity. As Rebecca Stott explains in her book Theatres of Glass: The Woman Who Brought the Sea to the City, Thynne was walking along the beach in Devon with her children. They were looking in tidal pools at the interesting creatures and she, who’d been interested in natural history almost her entire life, was looking for fossils to add to her collection. When she and her children stopped to look at a madrepore, a kind of coral, she found her collecting take a sudden and dramatic change. Stott paints the scene vividly:

She has tiny fossil madrepores in her collection…But she has never imagined that the live ones were as soft, slimy, and beautiful as the little speckled creature she has just found in this rock pool. Such surprising softness and colour after the lacy, pale brittleness of the fossils. She feels the creature’s tentacles probe blindly around her fingers.

This was in 1846. Thynne would collect several madrepores and, after stitching them to sponges, put them in glass jars to take home to London. Once there she hand-aerated the water, effectively creating the first ever home aquaria. Thynne would later add more creatures, creating a more “natural” environment, and would discover that they couldn’t just be maintained–they would thrive.

Stott, whose other non-fiction works include Darwin And The Barnacle and Oyster, part of the Reaktion Books Animal Series, and the new novel Ghostwalk gets a bit bogged down in trying to put Thynne’s work in a historical context, but then Thynne was an amateur naturalist and extremely interested in the scientific debates of the day–especially the brewing debate over evolution. Her discovery allowed scientists to study the lives of marine animals in greater detail than they ever had before, and allowed non-scientists to bring a little piece of the natural world into their homes. Thynne is almost completely forgotten now, although she helped create one of the Victorian era’s great crazes, and marine aquariums continue to be both useful for scientists and a nice feature in homes–although they’ve gotten a lot more elaborate. Starting with madrepores in pie pans, Anna Thynne  how her invention would contribute to the study of natural history or how it would become an addictive hobby for so many.


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