Who invented hydroponic gardening

While the French king Francis I had da Vinci in his employment, the inventor progressed his studies in agriculture. Ultimately he determined that plants need minerals to grow, which they absorb from the soil.

Notably, he realized that this occurs only with the help of water, the absence of which prevented any nutrient absorption. He detailed the strong importance of irrigation, and effectively laid out some of the very basic principles that govern hydroponics today. Mineral absorption through water, the importance of irrigation, and the idea of doing away with soil and delivering minerals through water, are just some of the things we can credit to him.

We can rightfully thank Sir Francis Bacon for the growing popularity of hydroponic research that began thereafter. So, thank you Sir Francis Bacon. At this point John Woodward had been experimenting with growing spearmint in soilless culture. When he published his experiments, he noted that the plants grew better in less pure water rather than the distilled water he also attempted to use.

The next century passed without much innovation specific to hydroponics. By about they had created a list of 9 nutrients that they believed were necessary to sustain plant life.

By , this list of 9 elements essential to plant growth had been more or less confirmed by Jean Baptiste Boussingault. He used inert, soil-like materials to place plants in, such as charcoal, pure sand, and quartz.

Boussingault then nourished the plants with chemical solutions he recorded. Water was needed, that was a given. But in his work he was pretty close to the mark with the other nutrients needed: namely, Nitrogen.

He then started work on the ratios of the minerals needed. However, this revelation was a critical foundation for the continued development of better plant food, much like the hydroponic fertilizers we use today. Thus, he settled on hydroponic. Gericke created something of an early PR opportunity for hydroponics when he appeared with vertically grown tomato plants in his new nutrient solution culture.

From to there was an increased interest in plant physiology and enhancing techniques for crop growth. However, expenses of food production also nudged hydroponics onto the world stage.

Transporting food to troops overseas during the second World War was also a financial burden. Rather than creating a shift away from hydroponics, it actually prompted the widespread use of hydroponics throughout the Pacific and South Atlantic. Daniel Arnon and Dennis Hoagland were the two to take up the cause, and they ended up publishing one of the cornerstone documents of hydroponics.

Their work, The Water Culture Method for Growing Plants Without Soil , is generally considered one of the most important publications to the development of hydroponics. They detailed the process and included formulations for nutrient solutions, now called Hoagland solutions, that are still widely used today. This ultimately resulted in one of the first major commercial hydroponic operations. Wake Island, a typical stopover and refueling point for Pan-Am Airways, was used as the staging area for this operation.

The current way of cultivating rice seemed to be by accident. After numerous seasonal flooding, most of the other sustenance crops were destroyed. However, the rice did not only survive the flooded fields, it thrived. This was the spark that lit the way for the hydroponic rice farming method that is still being used today. Not only did the rice grow better in flooded paddies, but it also became more resistant to pests — this is all thanks to its hydroponic element of the flood and drain cycle.

Further documentation on the use of hydroponics in China went beyond the rice paddies, thanks to legendary explorer Marco Polo. It is also worth mentioning that although rice fields were mainly used for hydroponic harvests, they developed into providing diverse food sources, too. In Indochina and China, the farmers also raised and harvested freshwater fish in the flooded rice paddies that were already used for harvesting rice.

This type of hydroponics is called aquaponics, which is almost like a closed system where the members have a symbiotic relationship. The fish waste provides additional nutrients for the rice, and the fish also eats the waterborne pests to keep the rice safe. Knop was successful at growing plants without using any soil, which ended up weighing many times more than the seeds and containing even more nutrients. They also managed to grow oats to weigh more than 2, times its original seed weight.

In the seventeenth century, low portable wooden frames covered with an oiled translucent paper were used to warm the plant environment much as plastic row covers do today. In Japan, straw mats were used in combination with oil paper to protect crops from the severe natural environment. Greenhouses in France and England during the same century were heated by manure and covered with glass panes.

The first glass house built in the 's, used glass on one side only as a sloping roof. Later in the century, glass was used on both sides. The glasshouse was used for fruit crops such as melons, grapes, peaches and strawberries and only rarely for vegetable production.

The developers of this new technology kept market profitability in mind: they produced crops which appealed to the wealthy and privileged, the only people who could afford the luxury of fresh fruit produced out of season in greenhouses.

Greenhouse food production was not fully established until the introduction of polyethylene. Without soil available in the arid desert, they may be the first example of successful hydroponics. In the 10th century, the Aztecs were reportedly using floating gardens in nearby lakes, and the Chinese utilized hydroponics for rice fields devoid of soil in the 13th century. By the 16th century, Belgian Jan van Helmont recorded the earliest known science-based research on hydroponics.

He noted that water delivered nutrients to plants. Building on Jan van Helmont's previous work, in , John Woodward created the world's first hydroponics nutrient solution after concluding that plant growth benefited by nutrients in water was more accessible than soil.

The 20th century was a flurry of studies and advancements in how we grow. In the late s, Dr. William F. Gericke of the University of California extended laboratory experiments to further studies on nutrition in practical, commercial crops growing outside.