Philip Henry Gosse was a naturalist, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and an innovator in the study of marine biology. He was born in 1810 in England.
In 1827, Gosse sailed from England to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear in the counting-house of Slade, Elson and Co. Gosse became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, “the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology” of the island.
In 1853 Gosse created and stocked the first public aquarium at the London Zoo. He coined the term “aquarium” when he published the first manual, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, in 1854.
