History of hydroponics

Simply put, hydroponics is the practice of growing plants using only water, nutrients, and a growing medium. The word hydroponics comes from the roots “hydro”, meaning water, and “ponos”, meaning labor, this method of gardening does not use soil.

Sounds high tech and futuristic, right? It’s not.

However, this practice (which is so called Hydroponics) has actually been used for thousands of years.    

The famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon in around 600 B.C. are the earliest record of Hydroponics in use. 

These gardens were built along the Euphrates River in Babylonia. Since the region's climate was dry and rarely saw the rain, people believe that the ancient Babylonians used a chain pull system for watering the garden plants.
In this method, water was pulled from the river and flowed up along the chain system and dropped to the steps or landing of the garden. 

Other records of Hydroponics in the ancient times were found with the floating farms around the island city of Tenochtitlan by the Aztecs in the Mexico in the 10th and 11th century. And in the late 13th century, the explorer, Marco Polo noted in his writing that he saw similar floating gardens during his traveling to China.

It was not until 1600 that there were recorded scientific experiments done on plants growth & constituents. Belgian Jan Van Helmont with his experiment indicated that plants obtained substances from water. However, he failed to know that plants also need carbon dioxide and oxygen from the air.

John Woodward followed to study the growth of plants using water culture in 1699. He found that plants grew best in water that contained the most soil. So, he concluded that it was certain substances in the water derived from soil that led to the plant growth, rather than from the water itself. 

There were several following studies done until 1804 when De Saussure proposed that plants were composed of chemical elements absorbed from water, soil, and air.
Boussignault, a French chemist, went on to verify this proposition in 1851. He did an experiment to grow plants in an insoluble artificial media including sand, quartz, and charcoal without soil. He used only water, media, and chemical nutrients. And he found that plants need water and get hydrogen from it; the dry matter of plants contains hydrogen plus carbon and oxygen which comes from the air; plants consist of nitrogen and other mineral nutrients.