Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was a physician by trade, a botanist by passion, and an inventor by accident. He collected plant species by the tens of thousands, his favorite were ferns, which proved especially vulnerable to the intense air pollution of Ward's native early-nineteenth-century London. Then, one day in 1829, the doctor discovered stray fern spores germinating at the bottom of a glass bottle in which he had placed the chrysalis of a moth. Curious, Ward designed a rectangular wooden box, topped with sloping glass, sealed airtight with putty at the joints. In it his ferns thrived.
展开▼
