What are genius inboxes and how have they changed the global economy?

Around 1829, he was trying to raise a sphinx moth from a cocoon that he had placed on a damp mold in a sealed jar when he was surprised to see that a fern had begun to grow.

He watched the water evaporate and condense, before returning to mold, seemingly recreating the basic cycle of Earth’s climate systems.

Could this miniature glass world be the perfect way to control air quality and humidity, allowing dying species to thrive?

Ward’s invention was simple: glass, wood, putty, paint…it was basically a small, enclosed greenhouse.

This was not a technological achievement, but the result of an inquiring mind: until then it had been thought that plants needed the outdoors. Ward wondered if they might not have asked for it, as economic journalist Tim Harford confirms.

His first attempts at growing his prized ferns in this small, enclosed ecosystem were successful.

He excitedly believed that he might have solved a problem that plagued plant hunters: how to keep them alive during a long sea voyage.

If they are kept under cover, they suffer from lack of light. If placed on deck, salt spray was fatal.

To test it, Ward sent two of his plant boxes to Australia.

Several months later a letter arrived from the ship’s captain offering ‘warm congratulations’: most of the ferns were ‘alive and active’ and the weeds were ‘trying to push the top of the box out’.

The ship returned with inboxes full of Australian plants, also in excellent condition.

Ward published a book about his invention, and dreamed it would have far-reaching effects. He was right, but not in the way he expected.

He predicted that plant lovers could set up miniature rainforests in their homes, and he was right: Even terrariums — which have their roots in Ward boxes — are back in fashion, driven by social media.

But also, as a physician, he envisioned large, enclosed greenhouses in which people could recover from measles or tuberculosis, without having to breathe the polluted air of cities.

What he did not expect was that his funds were about to transform global agriculture, politics, and trade.

Thanks to the flower boxes, the process of moving the plants outside went smoothly.

In 1833, George Lodges, a commercial importer, used Ward’s method and said that “while by the method previously employed he lost 19 out of 20 plants that made the journey, 19 out of 20 is now the average of the plants that have survived.”

Naturally, the method caught on.

But minds were more strategic than those of their inventor who immediately recognized the potential of the Ward Funds to reshape the economy in favor of the dominant empires of the time…

…starting with the one whose capital was in the city where Ward designed his boxes: London.

Ward published his book in 1847, a few years after Britain won the First Opium War.

When the Chinese decided to stop accepting Indian-grown opium in exchange for tea, the British sent gunboats to change their minds.

It wasn’t just because they liked the drink; Taxes on tea represented approximately a tenth of the British government’s income at that time.

But the powerful British East India Company, which ruled the Indian subcontinent on behalf of the United Kingdom, decided it needed an alternative strategy: grow more tea in India.

This means that the tea plants have to be smuggled out of China. And there was a perfect man for this task: botanist and plant researcher Robert Fortune.

He did try to no avail, but on his first trip he learned that if he shaved his head, wore a wig and Chinese clothes, he could go practically unnoticed.

In disguise, he managed to secretly send “glass boxes containing live plants” to England between 1848 and 1851, as he recounted in his memoirs.

With them, important tea plantations were established in the Indian regions of Assam and Darjeeling, thus breaking the Chinese monopoly on the tea market.

Perhaps something quite shocking happened 25 years later.

Faced with rising rubber prices, the British Foreign Office sent botanist and amateur businessman Henry Wickham to the Amazon to obtain rubber seeds. Brazilian Hevea.

In 1876, he shipped about 70,000 in Ward boxes, which were germinated at Kew Gardens and seedlings sent to Southeast Asia.

Brazil was unable to compete with the colonial plantations and eventually lost its dominance of the rubber trade, as it became one of the most profitable industries in the British Empire.

These are two great examples, but they are by no means the only ones.

The British were not the only ones who benefited from Ward’s funds in their quest for world domination.

In fact, one of the major European colonial empires was the first to be able to take one of the most important plants from the Andes for such a project: Eucalyptus officinalis.

From its bark was obtained quinine, the miracle potion discovered by the indigenous people of the Andes, which, among other things, protected against malaria, a deadly threat to Europeans who ventured to explore the tropics, and which they paradoxically introduced to America.

Justus Karl Haskarl, a German botanist in the service of the Dutch Empire, was the first to successfully transport seedlings from the Andes to the Indonesian island of Java in ward boxes (1854-1856).

By the end of the 19th century, that Dutch colony produced nearly 90% of the world’s quinine, making colonial campaigns and European expansion possible without the deaths that had previously accompanied them.

While quinine opened up the tropical world to Europeans, another invaluable plant was taking decisive steps toward globalization: the cocoa plant.

It is native to the Amazon Basin, and for centuries was largely cultivated only in Venezuela and Ecuador.

Its fruits were coveted by European aristocrats and merchants, and fine chocolate was considered an almost divine delicacy: as Sophie and Michael Coe comment in The True History of Chocolate, 18th-century European nobility spoke of it as “the nectar of the gods.”

The introduction of cocoa into West Africa began in the late 19th century in a simpler way, without the need for grape crates: fresh pods and viable seeds were transported, and the first plantations flourished on the Gold Coast and Ghana.

But when cocoa had to travel across continents, to Asia, Indian Ocean islands, or European botanical gardens, inboxes were crucial: they allowed delicate seedlings to survive months of travel from America to Ceylon, Java, or Reunion.

The result was a radical change in the global economy: West Africa went from producing nothing to dominating almost all of the world’s cocoa production by the beginning of the twentieth century, while Ceylon and Java became major exporters.

The fruit that had been exclusive to America began to form the backbone of colonial empires and transoceanic trade networks (“Science and colonial expansion“, written by Lucille Brockway;”Empire of plantsWritten by Toby and Will Musgrave.

If cocoa took the luxury of chocolate to new latitudes, vanilla did it even more wonderfully.

Europeans coveted it as a luxury good: it flavored cakes, desserts and drinks, and was considered a symbol of opulence and sophistication.

Orchid Vanilla planifolia It grows wild in the humid tropical forests of Mexico, Central America, and northern South America.

Historical and ethnographic studies indicate that the Totonaca region of Veracruz (the area known as Totonacapan) was among the first to domesticate it.

The truth is that for centuries Mexico had a global monopoly on vanilla production, partly because it was so delicate, and its flower would only bear fruit in the presence of its natural pollinator, the melipona bee.

However, the French, using crates, transported scraps from Mexico to Reunion, Mauritius and Madagascar.

But the problem of pollination remained, and the key came not from enlightened botanists, but from a 12-year-old enslaved boy named Edmund Albius.

In 1841, on the island of Reunion – a small French territory in the Indian Ocean – he discovered a simple and quick way to do this by hand.

His skill allowed the flower to bear fruit far from its native land, and within a few years Madagascar – not Mexico – became the world’s largest producer.

Madagascar vanilla has become “the aromatic gold of the Indian Ocean,” as Tim Eacott notes in his book Vanilla, in Search of Wild Orchids; The African island nation continues to contribute between 60% and 80% of global production to this day.

These are, of course, just a few examples: from beautiful orchids, fuchsias and roses, to delicious mangoes and exotic palms, they sailed the seas like treasures protected from all evil in those simple glass and wooden boxes.

As historian Luke Keogh, author of The Wardian Case, summarized, “This invention sparked a revolution in plant movement…and the repercussions of that revolution are still with us today.”

What began as an ingenious experiment by a plant lover ended up becoming a lever that transformed markets and landscapes and left an indelible mark on global botanical and agricultural geography.

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