A London doctor's glass box moved tea to India and rubber to Asia.
In the 1830s Nathaniel Ward noticed a fern sprouting inside a sealed bottle. His glazed 'Wardian case' kept plants alive for months at sea, where most had previously died. It launched the Victorian fern craze and let empires move tea, quinine and rubber across the world.
Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was a London physician and keen botanist whose garden ferns were being killed by the city's coal-smoke pollution. He also kept moth cocoons in sealed glass bottles, and in one he found a fern and a grass growing from a little soil. He left it sealed for about four years; the grass even flowered. Only when the seal rusted did the plants die. Ward had a carpenter build a tightly glazed wooden case, and his ferns thrived in it. He published his findings in a book in 1842. A Scottish botanist had built something similar almost a decade earlier but never published, so Ward got the credit.
The case solved an old problem. For centuries plant hunters had sent specimens home mostly as seeds, bulbs or dry roots, because salt spray, darkness and lack of fresh water killed nearly all living plants on long voyages. In a sealed case, plants could sit on deck in daylight, watered by their own condensation. In 1833 Ward shipped ferns and grasses to Sydney; they arrived months later in good health, and Australian plants that had never survived the journey made it back to London.
Wardian cases soon graced Victorian drawing rooms, fuelling crazes for ferns and then orchids. They also reshaped the world economy. Robert Fortune used them in the 1840s to carry tea plants out of China for British India; Clements Markham used them in 1860 to take cinchona, the source of quinine, out of South America; and in the 1870s rubber seedlings raised at Kew travelled in them to Ceylon and Malaya. They are credited with helping to break geographic monopolies on valuable crops. Kew used them until 1962.
There was a cost. The cases also carried pests and invasive plants, such as Japanese honeysuckle, around the globe. In 1924 an American plant official judged them probably responsible for scattering more dangerous insects, nematodes and other pests than almost any other carrier.
Source: Wikipedia — Wardian case · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
