This is a brief history of aquarium lighting with a special emphasis on DIY techniques through the ages.

I'd like to cover the period from roughly 1850 or so to the modern day, which is 2023 when I'm writing this. In this article I will cover various types of illumination technologies, discuss how they evolved, how we use them, and how they were modified by home craftsmen.

We begin in the Edwardian era. This is a time when English ships were sailing the world to and from every port-of-call in the British Empire; which at that time was roughly a third of the world. They went for spices, they went for opium, they went for gold, they went for diamonds; but they would bring back anything deemed valuable. Orchids, palms and exotic tropical plants were a particular subject of fascination.

These were so difficult to transport as many arrived dead or dying, never to recover. It took a while until a method transport would be devised. The Wardian Case was invented as, basically, a terrarium. It was a wooden box with glass panels and you put the plants in there on the ship and they would get enough light. What was killing them before is that they were in dark boxes below deck. That didn't work. So when this case was invented, plants began arriving from Indonesia and Sumatra, from India, from Papua New Guinea, from New Caledonia, from the Celebes islands, and all over South America; not just Asia, but Africa as well.

Thus it was realized that illumination was the most important point about keeping a plant alive. It didn't really matter if they got a bit cool, and they survived some degree of heat all right. They could dry out a bit, they can survive being too wet, but they couldn't survive without a light.

This was more evident when the plants arrived back in Britain. There was no notion back then of a house plant. Houses didn't have big windows, They were very cold, and there's no source of illumination, so almost any plant you put indoors would simply wither away and die.

The Edwardian Conservatory became a thing; Anybody with money would build a large room out of wood and glass that would be called a conservatory, which was more than a greenhouse. The greenhouse is typically a one level building where you have work benches and plants are grown there, and you work on them there. A conservatory was different; it was a very tall building to accommodate tropical trees. It was large, and it was mostly just plants growing. There was no notion of working in one, in fact there were no seating areas and tables. It was meant to be a room full of tropical plants as though it were a jungle room. These are extremely popular, especially in Britain. The British Empire wanted plants from all over the empire to be part of their house.

It didn't work very well because these plants don't like high temperatures. They thought they were all from the tropics; they knew they needed more light and that's why they built them the large glass buildings. They also thought they needed to be very warm, and that's not true for nearly all plants like this. They like our room temperature, they don't really like it very hot. So the English destroyed them that way.

They put in kerosene heaters to raise the temperature, and the smoke and the heat killed them. Plants like cool, clean air so it didn't go very well. After a while, they figured out it was the smoke, and they started to make some progress. The stuff they're doing at Kew Gardens even today is impressive, but back then they were among the first to get this stuff right. A lot of stuff that you can see there especially in the Crystal Palace that's the way it was nice and pretty figured out the stuff okay so but it was you know it wasn't all bad. ?

I'm making it sound like they tried a bunch of things and nothing worked and killed everything, and that's not really true. They had tremendous luck with some things, even without solving the burning kerosene and pollution problem. Things like Aspidistra, for example, called the Cast Iron plant from the 1880s until the 1940s, was the most common house plant in Britain because it was literally made of cast iron. You couldn't kill this thing; too dark? It doesn't care. Too much sunlight? Don't care. Too cold? Don't care. No water? Don't care.

No matter what you did, no matter which British home you put it in, they would be okay. That became very popular and led to Gracie Fields' song in the 1930s called "I've got the Biggest Aspidistra in the World". You'll see them in almost all movie sets of films of that era because they want to show a house but it was the only one they can show, so they use that one. That's why Aspidistra was good. So not everyone was poisoning their plants.

By the start of the Victorian era, we had gotten a good handle on what these plants need and how to grow them. Propagation of pineapples and bromeliads, and orchids, and oranges, and palm trees, and ferns was all commonplace. You look at any Victorian territory you can see them all there. What was very popular by the time Queen Victoria rolled around, was aquariums. They weren't called that, but water displays with a large basketball some sort with a bunch of fish in it and some plants growing out of it, usually Papyrus or umbrella ferns. It was very popular.?

We don't have a lot of aquarium magazines from the Victorian era because there weren't any. What you find is in Gentleman's Gazettes of the era with things like "Mr Smith from so and so had an open house and showed us all his large glass tanks containing his Madagascar laceleaf plant that she's been propagating; having got specimens from Hooker at Kew and he showed us on about this". In fact there's a tremendous amount written about the Madagascar lace plant in the Victorian era, in fact there's more in that era than in the modern era. Somehow we've forgotten all the things they've done. "Oh, we grow them in aquariums like potatoes", they would stick them in the backyard in a shallow dish, and cut up pieces of the root like a potato, stick in the dirt and let it sprout. It sprouts and is put in a big barrel; and they grow in full sunlight with no care. They would get magnificent three and four foot leaves.
Even indoors, there are photos from Gentlemen's Gazettes that show a fantastic large hex-sided aquarium with a giant laceleaf plant in it. So when we think back about the old days, we shouldn't always think they were primitive, with tin buckets with an odd creek fish. They were actually doing some pretty spectacular stuff way back when, and they didn't really have a good hang on aquarium plants, but they had a good handle on some. They used a lot of terrestrial plants like Papyrus; You'll often see in illustrations of Victorian conservatories and fish tank with large plants growing out of it. That's come back and that's popular today.
The illumination was still hopeless in this era though. You had sunlight and that was it. You may have had gas lighting. But the idea of gas lighting aquarium plants or conservatory plants was not really a thing. They didn't really think that it was possible or necessary to provide auxiliary lighting; and that had to wait until the invention of electricity.
Well out of Victorian era and or into the 20th century or getting close to the 20th century Victoria Rachel about 1904 so let's talk about post 1904 post Victorian aquarium lighting. At this point in time Edison and Tesla were arguing AC or DC and systems were being deployed all over the place but mostly in the Niagara region. Tesla was harnessing Niagara Falls to provide power for everyone. he said for free but Hydro had a different opinion on that.
Edison was running around wiring up DC everywhere as fast as he could so Tesla couldn't run his AC lines there as it was already done. This was a mess of course, and Edison was wrong; DC stuff works for small local areas like inside your RV. Tesla's AC power works across the country. So there was a bit of a chaotic start to the deployment of electricity in the early 20th century. Stuff was wired up adhoc, and some people lucked out and got Tesla's 110 volts AC. Right after that all the folks had houses where people would come in and sold Edison's DC system at 48 volts which is what the phone lines used today we didn't and we didn't realize all that stuff to test I thought was going to work just great or the Edison thought was going to work just great for home electricity it was a disaster you can't use 48 volts DC for your house, but you can use it for telephone.
That became the telephone line. You could put a phone on each end and that's all. In the 1930s or 1940s the last 48 volt DC systems got ripped out and now most of North America was running on 110 volts. then most of Britain was 220 volts. The point is most countries now had standardized electricity, and with standardized electricity, manufacturers can make products. They don't know what to make; they haven't got a clue what electricity is, but they can make things. The first thing they made with electricity was the electric pump and that was around during the Victorian era but you had to be king to get one. Only now they're getting to some point where in the early 20th century people can have electricity and they can get an electric pump. The light bulbs still not quite there yet. Having electric pumps, they were looking forward to using light bulbs. It took a while until aquarium lighting was at the point where you could use a light bulb you bought the store with, right into your tank. ?
Let's fast forward to about 1916. Its unclear what happened between 1904 and 1960; but that's where I started paying attention. So you have incadescent light bulbs, and they're okay, but they're not great.
The bad thing about incandescent light bulbs is they are extremely hot and they use a lot of power. They only give off about 10% of the energy they're given as light; the rest is given off as heat. While it's the best thing since sliced bread, and the only practical form of aquarium illumination, you can't use too much of it or it'll heat the water up. That being said, a lot of people did make big fancy complicated Aquarium lighting systems especially in Holland or the Netherlands. They'd make a hood for the tank out of wood, and in this they would affix up to a dozen or more light bulbs of various sizes shapes and types to illuminate the Center. For example, a spotlight to illuminate the back; or for example of the front, and to put regular light bulbs in certain places as highlight lighting.
As you can see, it didn't take very long between the invention of the light bulb to the invention of the homemade aquarium lighting fixture. That went on for decades, and there was no great step forward there until the fluorescent light which came into the aquarium hobby, roughly in the early 1970s. Between 1970 and '74 the first aquarium hoods with fluorescent lights were sold. But by that time you could buy fluorescent lights in fixtures that would fit aquarium sizes for example 24 inch or 18 inch. You could even adapt shop lighting and garage lighting. A lot of that happened.
It was a lot cheaper to adapt a garage shop light with flourescent bulbs than it was to build a fixture and buy an aquarium lighting cover with fluorescent lights because they were very very expensive to buy the hood, and the bulbs were outrageously expensive.
Bulbs in pet shops went from 25 or 35 cents to $55 so it was out of reach for most people, and the common man especially. A lot of aquarists would have to just go and buy shop lights and build their own fixtures. If you have a lot of tanks you're going to build your own fixtures anyway, so that didn't really matter. About 15 years later, the invention of the compact fluorescent changed things. Now you can take cheap unusable incandescent aquarium lighting hoods and you can scoop compact fluorescent bulbs into them.
While those little spiral bulbs were very good news, To be fair there was another modality of lighting that came with a cost. It was a pretty high cost. Very few in the 1980s installed the HID lighting systems that rose to popularity in aquarist circles in Germany because of the Dupla book. ?
the Dupla book was significant in several ways. To give an example, let's compare and contrast aquarium fertilization and lighting in the Innis book from the early 20th century and from the Dupla book of the 1980s.
Innis declared aquarium fertilization to be a dangerous and fool hardy experiment. Which if you see what he recommended, you pretty much have to agree. His suggestion, if you wanted to try, was this: just pipette some sheep manure tea under the gravel.
This would indeed do something; some plants would gain some benefit, but as Innis points out, you'll see what you get is algae.
The Dupla book was written by Kasper Horst and Horst Kipper who went to Thailand. They took metrics of the water in the streams that grew the plants they wanted to grow. They found that the pH and the hardness and the mineral content of the water was so different from what we have in Aquaria, that drastic measures needed to be taken. They also measured the light intensity, the percent of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the water, and the temperature of the substrate.
Horst and Kipper took samples, made readings, and observations all over Southeast Asia then went back to Germany and began engineering next generation aquarium equipment. They created sub-sand heating cables to keep the plants roots warm like they are in the wild.
They invented methods of injecting carbon dioxide into the aquarium water to get the CO2 to be as high as it was in the streams where these plants grew. They made special large trickle filters to keep the water as oxygenated as it is found in nature but most important to this discussion is the lighting.
They suggested this was more than incandescent bulb, this wasn't even fluorescent. instead they turned to lights more often use for Street lighting, and began experimenting with High Itensity Discharge Lighting systems such as high pressure sodium, mercury vapor and Court halogen HQI lamps that make very white light. Sodium is a very yellow light, Mercury is a very blue light and the quartz halogen HQI, high quality incandescent, are very very good full spectrum aquarium lights.
These became the mainstay of high-end signs of the hobby. If you had a very expensive freshwater planted tank you probably had HQI lighting, or some sort of high intensity discharge lighting. If you had a marine tank with live plants and live coral there was no other option; you had HID lights. This is fine for that sector of the hobby that could afford this stuff, but it was really expensive to buy, and even more expensive to run. It was hot, and it was fragile, so it was good but it wasn't the end-all-be-all. It never scaled down. These things start at 200 watts and go up to 1.5 kilowatts. There's no 40-watt bulb for a small tank. These things are meant to light up a room; not an aquarium. Trying to use one of these lights on a small aquarium is like trying to take a 747 to go to the store to buy milk; it's just not practical.
So by the time about 1990 came around, there were two competing illumination sources to displace incandescent. There was high intensity discharge lighting for big systems or expensive systems; and there was fluorescents and then compact fluorescent.
The HID stuff never really went anywhere, in fact it was replaced by fluorescents but I guess that in a bit the compact doesn't change everything because you could put those into a light bulb socket and now you had a fluorescent light in a regular fixture.
That was everyone's dream. They weren't bad, they were okay if you use a lot of them. They were fine because it was very efficient. It was terrible shape, you just couldn't handle them, and then all sorts of things going against them, another wrong Spectrum, yeah yeah yeah yeah. ?
In the end, if you use enough of them they were okay. They worked if you need more light than you get from 4 foot tubes. so I have to say that the use of fluorescent lighting more so than HID lighting was probably the most significant advance of the 20th century in aquarium lighting.
Starting in the year 2000, aquarium lighting really hadn't changed, but there were things on the horizon that would have a dramatic effect in years to come. Specifically, the LED or light emitting diode. I was a young man working in a computer company in 1974 and asked one of the engineers who was playing with light emitting diodes when are we going to have LED light bulbs. He just laughed into his head back and said "well first have to make blue they can't". Then about 20 years after that when they can make some cheap. we can you'll have them so when you're an old man you'll have them". Well here I am, I'm old and I have them, so he was right.
in 2000,there were no aquarium LED lights until about 2005. on some aquarium plant bulletin boards people were beginning to experiment with the new Cree 1 watt LED. these things were big, they were hot, they were expensive. did use do a lot of power and they were pretty blinding. everyone's first reaction was these can't possibly be as good as fluorescent. My thoughts were yeah maybe not, maybe there's almost as good cuz they're sure cheaper and run better and have no problems like with glass tubes filled with Mercury vapour, there's that. do I great.
I had always planned to mess around with some DIY LED stuff in that era, but to be honest it wasn't practical. Most parts were so expensive and so hard to mount with heat sinks and special power supplies it's just most impractical. What a lot of us did putting a compact fluorescent involved in anything I could screw in to, to make hoods and you put standard light bulb fixtures. and I had lots of those, they were great. LED's pretty much weren't there yet. After about 5 to 10 years, people, and I think Amano brought out the first one Takashi Amano. LED aquarium lighting systems began appearing on the market. Typically these were very different from the aquarium hoods of yesteryear; they weren't a small piece of plastic on top with a bulb inside. They were two large metal legs with a big plastic piece on top, on a lot of LEDs that were very bright. They're also hundreds and hundreds of dollars. They were no better than HID lights. they're bright but they're really expensive and for the money you can get more light from hid. so I passed on the whole idea of expensive LED lights. to some extent the cost has come down, but not enough. We all know these things are cheap, there's no reason other than the tax for being an early adopter why these things should be so expensive.
at some point economy-of-scale dictates that LED lighting will be cheap and practical on aquariums in the future. Well, I'm happy to say the future is here. In fact, the future appeared in November of 2022 when Dollar Stores began selling four types of very cheap LED lighting.
number one was a basically a flexible circuit board with a bunch of color LEDs on them and remote control so you can adjust the color. the circuit board has a self adhesive back; so in theory, just stick it on to the other side of a shelf, plug it into a USB port which is where it gets his power, and use the remote control to turn it on and change the color.
The second type of LED lighting that showed up in dollar stores, and keep in mind these are all four bucks, was a white flexible plastic thick strip, similar to the rope lights of previous years with a bunch of white LED's.
these don't change color, there's no remote. It's just white light and it's quite dim. It's accent lighting for under cabinet, so I suspect it's not very bright but it's just LEDs inside of square piece of plastic and it's flexible and soft.
You can actually cut the top layer of plastic off there by exposing the LEDs, and you now have a strip of very bright white lights. I like the self-adhesive color version, this actually does have potential to use in aquariums and terrariums.
the third type is supposed to be on the back of your television to throw a light as a surround. It comes with a remote, it's about four to six inches long, about 2 in wide about 2 in tall and a big plastic container.
you can change the color of the light and it's pretty much useless for aquariums I think unless you had a tank that's very close to the same size and didn't really care about the quality of the color of the light.
the problem with both this one and the first one is when you select white light it's just blue. I mean not navy blue, I mean it's like light sky blue and not daylight blue. It's like really blue so it's not appropriate. it's a white light and you can't get anything that's like balanced red and blue it wasn't green I mean if you control the RGB guns into apparently you could dial in your own white but you can't see you're stuck
the fourth type is a ring light sold as a photographic aid. It is a 6-inch ring with a 4-inch diameter hole, and it's full of LEDs and it has a wide remote plugs into a USB port. You can select daylight, cool white, or natural light, and the light quality is quite good because it's a photographic tool. I've tried it for that, and it works pretty good. Not the brightest, not the best, but it's not bad. It does help to solve some problems. I took it apart and put it on the underside of my bookcase on top of my desk. It's a fantastic little light for four bucks. You got a light that doesn't need batteries, you can adjust the color of the light, and it's good and bright.
Would I use this over an aquarium? You bet! Out of all these four, this is the one I would stick over a tank and if it wasn't enough, I'd stick two of them over a tank. I mean that's eight bucks to light up a 10 gallon tank forever. These things don't burn out. How is that not a great deal?
so there we are there's the Genesis and development of aquarium lighting: from the candle, to the gas light, to the incandescent bulb, to the fluorescent bulb, to the HID lamp, into the LED. The advent of LED lights is the most exciting part because now we're looking at buying $4 parts to light up an aquarium.
What used to be by $3 light only by 15 bucks worth of parts to light up an aquarium, now it's four bucks. This is going to change things, and the future is only brighter. this is what we have now, what are we going to get next year, and in 5 years from now? It's time to rethink the whole nature of aquarium lighting, because now that we're using little LED's power source why we plugging him into a giant Hydro System, it's too simple just to stick a solar panel outside and then run this thing. down there's no voltage conversions tonight I've got cheap efficient lighting that with a couple of bucks worth Parts doesn't even cost you any money anymore. This is the kind of aquaristic Utopia we've been dreaming of, because the limiting factor for growing plants was always the cost of electricity; to light the pressure tubes, to make the plants grow. with with cheap LEDs and cheap solar panels which are out now, you can do so much more.
next year will be even cheaper there will be more product so a year after that, and five years after, and at some point we have to stop using Mains electricity. Your solar panels and this should be expanded on at the keyboard