Changes

While interest in ornamental fish increased in Europe with greater access to wealth and contacts with China, the main development that made public aquariums took time to develop. The major development was the innovation of the Wardian case, which was a type of glass container used to house plants. This development by Jeanne Villepreux-Power in 1832 was made for the study of plants, but it was soon realized that live fish could be contained within these glass enclosures. Soon after, others began to experiment with tropical fish, where they were placed in tanks to see how they would respond. It was evident to scientists that plants that lived in water provided oxygen that fish could use, allowing tropical fish in particular to be kept indefinitely so long as the number of plants was sufficient for the number of fish. Mostly, until about the 1850s, fish keeping in aquarium was the privy of scientists or those wealthy enough to have such interests. Things changed after the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. The first large public aquariums were now built in places such as the London Zoo (in 1853) that were mostly metal-framed structures created by Phillip Gosse, who used the term aquarium for the first time. The "Fish House" was created as the first public aquarium in the London Zoo, where it pioneered the use of a series of fish tank containers along the walls and other exhibits in the main floor of a dedicated building to fish. Now it became fashionable to collect exotic and strange species as public curiosity increased.