Proposal and creation of the Ocean House project

The proposal and creation of the Ocean House project marks Washington Black’s move from assisting another man’s invention to conceiving and building a public enterprise of his own. His plan is a permanent exhibition where visitors can study living aquatic animals at close range. He turns that idea into practice through experiments, calculations, custom-built tanks, and work with Tanna Goff and G. M. Goff. Ocean House becomes both a place of shared scientific labor and a test of who is permitted to claim authorship: Washington sees his design and work throughout the exhibition, while anticipating that the public will celebrate Goff as its creator.

The proposal and its purpose

At dinner with the Goffs, Washington interrupts the conversation about an exhibition to suggest that it should be a living one. He imagines a large gallery filled with tanks of aquatic life, alongside open-air terrariums for toads, turtles, and lizards. Visitors would be able to press close to the glass and learn the animals’ habits through direct observation; the exhibition might operate as a permanent indoor park. Tanna recognizes the proposal as a sea menagerie, while G. M. Goff initially doubts that such a project can be made practical. Washington answers that possibility depends on making the thing possible, and Goff acknowledges that it would be a marvel.

The idea rests on a practical question as much as a presentational one: how can living organisms be kept in an artificial environment long enough for people to observe them? Washington’s proposal asks the public not merely to look at specimens but to encounter the habits of living creatures. Its promise therefore depends on the design and maintenance of the tanks, as well as on the choice and arrangement of what they contain.

Experiments and construction

Washington’s first experiments begin with small marine organisms. After gathering rotifera and infusoria with seawater, he places them in a stoneware cask, but they die. He then reasons that marine animals and plants may sustain one another: animals consume oxygen and release carbonic acid, while plants absorb carbonic acid and release oxygen. The clear glass of his next receptacle also lets vegetation receive the light needed for synthesis. The specimens survive longer, though Washington has to stir the water and syringe out waste and decay.

To consider how this method might scale up, Washington travels with Medwin Harris to Halifax and questions a foreman at a warehouse under construction. The conversation helps him make calculations for a larger tank. Drawing on the precise mensuration he had learned while working on the Cloud-cutter, he designs one with plate-glass walls and parallel sides to prevent distortion. He tests bonding putties and settles on white lead, then seals it behind shellac dissolved in naphtha and mixed with whiting, so the water will not contact the lead and be exposed to its oxide.

The prototype is built over three evenings with materials assembled through local connections. It measures two feet long, one and a half feet wide, and half a foot deep, with a one-inch slate base. Washington turns discarded birchwood into pillars, obtains four cut panes of glass through a glass-blower indebted to Medwin, and fits the panes into grooves in the slate and wood. The care invested in containment is inseparable from the living purpose of the design: a tank that holds water but harms its inhabitants would defeat the project.

From individual design to a public exhibition

Once the Ocean House work expands, Washington and Tanna take an active role in sourcing materials and specimens. After a period in which the strain of his search for Titch unsettles their relationship, they begin going into the city together almost daily to inspect equipment and animals. They obtain Portland and Roman cement for artificial rocks and Thames river sand for the tank bottoms, and seek out annelids and crabs. They also discuss the seasonal effects of light: Ocean House’s large, poorly blown windows may help plants in summer while exposing animals to damaging solar rays.

The tanks made for the main floor are produced by Wolcott and Sons. Their sizes range from sixteen inches to nearly eight feet; slate forms their bottoms and iron their frames. Seeing them arranged together makes the original proposal tangible. The project’s technical demands have now grown beyond Washington’s first small experiment, yet the central aim remains to keep aquatic life visible and viable within an indoor setting.

The exhibition receives institutional support in London. Before leaving for the city, G. M. Goff presents the idea to the Zoological Committee, which accepts it enthusiastically. The city provides land and allows an old timber building in the zoological gardens to be repurposed; if work proceeds swiftly, Ocean House can open to the public the following year. The building is tall and narrow, set among black poplars. Its left wing had exploded some three years earlier and was rebuilt, leaving new, pale timber beside the weathered boards. The project’s home thus bears a visible history of damage and repair even as it prepares to display another kind of fragile life.

Authorship and significance

For Washington, seeing the plan take shape is a personal vindication. The Cloud-cutter had required his labor, but it had always belonged to Titch’s vision; Ocean House, by contrast, is an idea Washington can regard as his own. He understands, however, that his name is unlikely to enter the institution’s history. The celebrated founder will be G. M. Goff, not Washington, whom racial prejudice and his lack of formal scientific training would prevent from approaching the committee as an equal. Goff is not presented as simply taking credit out of malice: Washington recognizes both his desire for a late achievement and the barriers that make recognition for Washington himself difficult.

The exhibition’s promise and its injustice develop together. Washington takes fierce pride in the finished space and sees his labor in the tanks’ dimensions and materials, the selected specimens, and the arrangement of aquatic plants. At the same time, he knows that the public record will omit his contribution. The conflict is not resolved by the project’s success: he must consider whether he can make peace with that erasure or leave the enterprise and the people connected to it.

Ocean House therefore makes scientific observation a public experience while raising questions about who controls the conditions of display and who is recognized for creating them. Its living specimens are meant to be understood rather than feared, but Washington’s own work remains poised to become invisible within the institution he helped make. The project’s creation gives him a durable mark of his own making, even as its anticipated history threatens to assign that achievement to someone else.