Marc Finnell
speaker
240 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 28 Jun
Marc Finnell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
There are some living rooms that would have looked less like houses and more like indoor jungles, including the home of Nathaniel Ward.
So there were plants in glass cases littered around Ward's home.
But he wasn't just surrounded by plants for aesthetics.
Ward was learning about the best conditions in which they grow.
It was like a home meets a greenhouse meets a science lab.
What Nathaniel has created, by pure accident, is a miniature, self-sustaining greenhouse.
A confined environment for his fern to thrive in, away from London's smog outside.
And living off a water cycle created inside the glass enclosure.
Now, just to be clear, Ward didn't invent the idea of people keeping plants alive under glass.
People have been playing around with versions of this for a very long time.
There's one example in ancient Rome where vegetables were grown for Emperor Tiberius in carts covered with a thin sheet of selenite.
In the 1800s, you start to get something closer to what we would recognise as a greenhouse, these big glass structures, white frames where you could walk around and maybe sit and have tea if you're feeling extremely Victorian.
The crucial thing is, at the time, we didn't call them greenhouses.
So Ward has his eureka moment by creating a miniature glass house.
He's now repeated the experiment on a few different plants around the house over a couple of years.
Now the time has come to expand the experiment.
And this is the moment Nathaniel Ward creates the thing that would become his legacy.
An object that on the surface looks incredibly humble, but this little box would help fuel global trade, imperial expansion, colonialism on a massive scale.
And this is what it looked like.
It was inspired by terrariums, so I want you to picture a sturdy wooden box about the size of a large chest with big glass panels built into the sides and a peaked glass roof sitting on top.
Showing 141–160 of 240 · page 8 of 12
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