How this Geezer did it in the beginning

[Paul B]

I have been asked a few times to document some of the practices from when the salt water hobby started which in the US was in about 1971. It started in Germany a few years before that and al of the older books were translated from German. That is kind of wierd because Germany is land locked.
Here in New York Salt water started in Manhattan in a very large store named "Aquarium Stock Company" it was a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center.
I had just gotten back from serving in Viet Nam and my tank was waiting for me. It had a large catfish in it when I was drafted and I don't think anyone fed it for the two years I was gone, it died a week before I got home.
Anyway, I dumped out the water and looked for some gravel. I didn't have any money (pay in the military was about $300.00 a month) and I was saving for my wedding.
I did try blue driveway gravel but even though that looked great, it didn't work out. I managed to buy some dolomite.
Although Instant Ocean was available then I didn't know about it and could not find it.
Speaking of Instant Ocean, that was invented by the owner of the oil company "STP" that we all used to put in our cars. I am not sure if it did much but it was sticky and if you used it, you were cool. We never kept out cars stock unless you were a Nerd (which was a word that was not invented yet)
Our cars had to be all customized so they were clearly "ours" and didn't look like anyone eles's car.
Also, gas was 27 cents a gallon so horse power meant everything and gave you bragging rights. There was no such thing as Gas economy.
The biggest problem was I still had a problem getting that $5.00 together to fill the tank, I rarely bought more than two bucks.
OK back to fish.

I filled the tank with fresh water and added some NSW from the East River. I added some scats, mono's, figure 8 puffers, archerfish and bumblebee gobies.
The tank was brackish and all was well. After a few months I saw that blue devils were for sale and I had never seen such things and neither did anyone else.
So I went down to the Long Island Sound and added more salt water so I could get blue devils.
They were $7.00 each, a huge expense, more than a tank of gas, so I did some side jobs and bought them. They had so much ich that I thought they were supposed to have spots. They quickly died. I read like a sponge but there was virtually no information in English about ich.
Then I met this marine biologist working in a lab. I told him my dilemma and he told me that copper kills ich.
OK, the only copper I had was pennies so I threw a bunch of pennies in.
Where the pennies are placed determines how much copper disolves into the water, so if you put them in some water flow, they would disolve faster. I made a holder so the pennies would stay on their edge so all surfaces of the pennies touched the water. If you just threw them in the water only half the penny was exposed to the water.
See it was not as easy as it sounds. The dosage was very tough. It had to be high enough to kill the ich before the fish died but too much copper was fatal to the fish. I found out through experimentation that I had to watch the fish closely and if they laid on their side, there was too much copper in the water and I had to remove some pennies and change some water. Remember, I didn't have ASW and had to drive to the Sound 30 minutes away.
Eventually I got the dosage correct and the fish lived.
The next fish available was domino's and sargeant majors. They were ugly but hard to kill.
I kept a HOB filter on the tank with filter floss and a UG filter. The light was a chrome thing with one of those long aquarium bulbs.
Food was fresh water Tetra Min flakes.
I learned very quickly about salt creep because I could not touch anything in or near the tank without getting a shock. The pump in the HOB filter was iron and should not get wet as was the metal light fixture. I kept a stick near the tank so I could push the button on the light to turn it off. There was no touching the pump without un plugging it.
If I had to stick my hand in the tank, I had to un plug the light and pump or I would get thrown across the room. (GFIs were not invented for another 20 years or so)
To feed the fish without touching the tank, I clamped a can of flakes inside the light and that had a hole in it. I also inserted an air line tube into the can. When I wanted to feed the fish, I blew into the tube and that blew some flakes into the tank.
Notice I never said "we" did anything because I didn't know anyone with a salt water tank so everything was just me. (no computers, cell phones or internets)

I will continue this when I have some more time.

 

[Aaarrrggg]

Fascinating! V clever with the penny holder/dosing. Looking forward to reading more!

 

[KafudaFish]

Kind of like listening to the radio insteading of watching TV because I can imagine you being thrown across the room.

 

[Detroit_306]

Totalllyyyy subscribing

 

[BigCountry74]

+1

Love the pennies. haha

 

[ken55]

Facinating!!

 

[Paul B]

Kind of like listening to the radio insteading of watching TV

TVs had tubes in them and tuners so every time you changed the channel, there was this knob behind the tuner knob that you had to adjust so the picture was clear. Sometimes you also had to adjust the verticle hold or the picture would roll. If you wanted to change a channel, you got up and walked to the TV because channels didn't change themselves. It wasn't much of a chore because there was only 6 channels and usually nothing you wanted to see on 5 of them.

Where was I?
Oh fish tanks. My UG filter was run by an airstone. There were no powerheads yet.
The airstone would make a pillar of salt up to the light which I already discussed.
The air pumps were piston powered, not vibrators. There was a motor with a belt that turned a pully that ran a leather piston in a cylinder. They were expensive and you could get a double piston job but I never had the money for one of those. The leather piston had to be oiled every week or so or the bubbles were very weak. The motors were not built very well and eventually they ran too hot and would stall and burn out. To remedy that I always built a fan blade to go on the motor armature to cool the motor. It worked great but it would increase the noise on the already noisy device. That caused me to put the pump in a closet and close the door. Of course that caused the thing to run hotter necessitating a larger fan blade which was noisier.
We also didn't have those one way air valves so if the leather piston dried out too much or if the pump overheated and stopped, water would siphon out of the tank and go through the pump so after that happened a few times I had to raise the pump higher than the tank.
Fish were not very healthy, especially with the copper from the pennies and the oil that would go in the water from the pump and the electricity that was always coursing through the water and the metal that would drip off the light but at least they were living.
When the fish would get sick we had medications. Medications were one of two colors, either deep blue or flourescent yellow. You didn't feel it was working unless it was a cool color. Sometimes I mixed them but that just turned brown. The medications were great at one thing, killing the fish. But they had a beautiful tinge to them.
We also used potassium permanganate, methelene blue, malachite green and there was another color medication, I forgot what it was. Probably chartruce something.
Most of those medications were for fin rot and I think the malachite was for spots.
Spots were just called spots. Ich was originally called "white spot disease, then "coral fish disease" then oodinium, then ich, then oodinium then back to ich.
I don't know what it is called now.

We decorated the tanks with dead coral skeletons that we bought in gift shops. LFSs didn't sell coral.
Actually there were no LFSs, they were pet shops and may have had a small area that they put some fish.
When I first started in the 50s, fish were sold in toy stores and were sold as toy fish in cardboard containers like take out food comes in as there were no plastic bags that I remember.
If a pet shop got salt water fish in stock, they put a big sign outside that said "we have salt water fish"
That usually meant they had a 5 gallon tank with 3 blue devils in it.
(This is about the start of salt water tanks, fish keeping in the US started just after WW2)

Getting back to the dead coral skeletons, every couple of weeks we would remove al of that and soak them in bleach or a little acid to make them very white. If we saw a little green, we would get the horrors and bleach everything.
You can see some of those bleached corals in this early picture of my tank as I was building the basement around it and it was still under construction. This was from about 1979 after the tank had been running about 8 years.

 

[hobbby3]

You should write a book. I'll buy it

 

[KafudaFish]

I have used those piston air pumps before but it was the mid 90s. The professor I worked for used the same equipment from the 70s. Once a week I had to put a few drops on a valve to keep things going.

4 drops ok 5 not so much and the oil would shoot down the line into the tank.

She even used those little clear box internal filters and once a week I had to change out the filter floss and charcoal.

 

[jprime84]

I feel like I'm eating werther's originals on your front porch.

 

[Paul B]

You should write a book. I'll buy it

I started a book when I started the tank, I still have it, sketches and all. If I live long enough, I will finish it.

And you guys thought you have problems now with your test kits, LEDs, ASW and reactors. :crazy1:

Now everything is simple, you just go on your computer, push a few buttons and figure out what you are doing. :bum:

I feel like I'm eating werther's originals on your front porch

Do you have any more, I love those.

 

[Paul B]

She even used those little clear box internal filters and once a week I had to change out the filter floss and charcoal

I still have them and sometimes use them in breeding tanks.

See this green "manifold" on my reverse UG filter? That was an old HOB filter.

 

[Lateralus]

You should write a book. I'll buy it

hear hear!

Thnx for sharing Paul. Im hooked.

 

[NMC]

This is fun. I, too, started a tank in the early 70's. I killed a number of fish, none survived, there were no corals, I quit.

So much has changed since then. Congrats to you for sticking with it way back then.

 

[Reefing Newbie]

Awww the bleached coral skeletons. That is when you know they are old tanks.

I watched a movie in biology at the beginning of the year about a deadly disease (really I can't remember) and there was a fish tank with the bleached coral skeletons. I think the movie was from the mid to late 80s...

 

[SKurj]

I remember running UG filters with nothing but air pumps but that was the early 80's... Dad still wonders why I am not running one now (he maintained that tank back then, thought it was FW, I was a teenager with other things on my mind...)

The penny thing still hasn't gone away, it was something I was considering in a FW tank not long ago...

Now Paul... in all the years, have you ever had to deal with that tank leaking?

Its a nightmare we had to deal with a few times in the early 80's I never want to go through, yet I know its not a question of if, more a question of when.... You have had that tank so long... or have you replaced it through the years?

 

[SushiGirl]

Subscribed!

 

[i Tuna]

Fascinating Paul

 

[gmate]

I consistently say this, but best poster on Reef Central and a proud member of my tri-state area. Thanks for sharing Paul.

 

[Paul B]

Awww the bleached coral skeletons. That is when you know they are old tanks

I still have some of those old coral skeletons and they are part of my live rock under the structure.

in all the years, have you ever had to deal with that tank leaking?

This tank has not leaked and the glass is 36 years old. I did have tanks leak before this. One was on top of a set of encyclopedia's which were PCs made of wood but more expensive and they didn't need batteries.

Thank you GMate.
This morning they invited me to the New York Aquarium as their guest for a back stage tour.
I will let you know how that goes.