Ant Farm Fun For Over 150 Years

Ant farms are one of the most popular educational toys on the market today. And theres no doubt that kids can learn an awful lot about ants, social insects, group behaviour, and all sorts of other interactions by watching ants going about their business. But how did it all start?

It's not easy to say but people seem to have begun building ant farms in the mid nineteenth century. Until the mid 1800s, glass had been a fairly expensive commodity and certainly not something one would waste on a childs toy. Until the development of the float glass process, most window glass had been produced by the cylinder method, invented by Sir Henry Bessemer in 1848. Nolten glass was formed into big cylinders which were slit open to make a flat (or flattish) sheet; no wonder it was expensive.

We don't have a name for the first person to layer some sand between sheets of glass to make an ant habitat but it was probably one of the gentleman naturalists of the Victorian period. These were men, usually with a private income, who, to put it bluntly, had little else to do with their time except go exploring and studying the natural world. We have a lot to thank them for, as the undoubtedly contributed much to our understanding of nature. The early models were call formicaria and tended to be located in schools and museums.

It wasnt until the late 1950s, when Sir Alastair Pilkington developed the float glass process, which involved floating molten glass on a layer of molten tin, that perfectly flat glass became widely and cheaply available. This enabled ant farms to be built from waste glass quite easily.

Simultaneously, a toy company based in Hollywood of all places, Uncle Milton Industries, began to market plastic ant habitats with great success. They gave the toy the name of 'Ant Farm' and protected the name by registering it. Half a century later the formicary has evolved into hundreds of ant farm models of many different types and sizes. Even NASA has got in on the act by developing an ant farm where the burrowing medium is not sand but a transparent nutrient gel. These are now widely available too. From the early formicaria of the gentleman naturalists to the space-age gel versions of today, the ant farm is as popular now as it ever was and the amazing activities of ants still hold us in thrall just as they did all those years ago.

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Discover the fun you and your family can have with an ant farm at http://www.antfarmcentral.com

Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com

Tags: ant farm

, ants

, uncle milton

, formicaria

, formicary

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