Who invented the aquarium? Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794-1871), a brilliant self-taught marine biologist, did. Yet, her name has been completely forgotten while her invention is part of our daily lives. Time has come to restore the legacy of this pioneering woman scientist.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power: who was the inventor of the aquarium?

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was born in Juillac in 1794. She knew how to read and write. Her youth was marked by a series of tragedies: first the death of her younger sister, then that of her mother. In 1812, at the age of eighteen, Jeanne moved to Paris.

She made the journey on foot, under the care of a cousin and with a herd of cattle bound for the slaughterhouse. On the way, her cousin assaulted her, forcing her to take refuge first in a police station and then in a convent. But Jeanne eventually reached Paris and found work as a milliner.

She was soon taken under the protection of a famous dressmaker. In 1816, Jeanne worked on the wedding dress of Marie-Caroline of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. Thanks to her talent, the dress caused quite a sensation.

It was around that time that Jeanne met James Power, an Irish businessman living in Messina, Sicily. She followed him there and married him in 1818.

Jeanne Villpreux-Power’s scientific innovations: a naturalist’s compendium

Jeanne now lived in comfortable conditions, but she had no desire to remain idle. She quickly integrated into social and scientific circles. She learned English and Italian and explored Sicily extensively.

She went on to write two guides based on her explorations, the most complete being Guida per la Sicilia. In it, Jeanne offered an extraordinarily thorough overview of Sicily’s flora and fauna, cataloguing 267 species of birds, 627 plants, and 600 mollusks. She also described natural, historical, and cultural sites of interest. One section of her work focused on Mount Etna’s eruptions and their effects on vegetation. The guide became extremely popular among Sicilians.

Inventing the first glass aquarium: pioneer of the fish tank

Between 1820 and 1838, Jeanne conducted many observations in marine biology, mainly on mollusks and octopuses. To keep her specimens alive, she invented several pioneering devices:

• one made of glass to study live mollusks
• another made of glass and surrounded by a cage submerged in the sea to study small mollusks
• a cage for larger mollusks, which could be sunk and anchored at a specific depth

These inventions represented a major step toward the development of the modern aquarium. They were, in a way, the first fish tank. Her work was recognized by Catania’s Academy of Science, and Jeanne became its first female member. In 1858, the naturalist Richard Owen acknowledged her as the inventor of the aquarium in his work Mollusca:

“But to Madame Jeannette Power (née de Villepreux), according to the testimony of Professor Carmelo Maravigna in the Giornale Letterario dell’Accademia Gioenia di Catania (December 1834), ought to be attributed, if to any one individual, the invention and systematic application of the receptacles now called Aquaria to the study of marine, and principally of molluscous animals.”

Jeanne Villepreux-Power also settled an important scientific debate concerning the argonaut’s shell. Did the argonaut grow its own shell, or did it behave like a hermit crab? Thanks to her experiments, Jeanne demonstrated that the argonaut indeed produced its own shell. She managed to have her discovery recognized and accepted as scientific consensus. In 1839, she became a member of the Zoological Society of London, as well as of sixteen other European institutions.

Jeanne’s other scientific discoveries

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was also a talented artist. Sadly, most of her artwork was lost in a shipwreck, except for a single surviving painting of an argonaut. In 1842, she and her husband returned to France and settled in Paris. She continued her scientific work and, in 1860, published observations on martens.

In 1871, Jeanne took refuge in Juillac to escape the siege of Paris. She died there the same year.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was soon forgotten, until historians restored her contributions to collective memory as the woman who made the very first aquarium. In 1997, a crater on Venus was named in her honor.

I run this project on a voluntary basis because I think these women’s stories deserve to be told. My goal is to build a comprehensive online archive to safeguard this heritage.

Hours of research hide behind each post. My content is human-written, without AI-Generated visuals.

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Further reading and bibliography about Jeanne Villepreux-Power

Association Jeanne Villepreux-Power – Femme de science et artiste 

Arnal Claude, Jeannette Villepreux Power à Messine: l’Argonauta argo et l’invention de l’aquarium (1832)

Debaz Josquin, “Jeanne Villepreux-Power : une pionnière de la biologie marine”

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