Ants Under Glass: The Invention of the Ant Farm

Ant Farms are among the few times when people voluntarily welcome insects into their homes. I got an Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm for Christmas when I was seven or eight. This was the mid-1980s, and kids my age were angling to get their parents to buy a Cabbage Patch Kid or a Care Bear. I’ve always been a nerd so I wanted an Ant Farm, a chemistry set, and a rock tumbler. I got the Ant Farm, but had to wait weeks for the ants to arrive. They were shipped separately.

The Ant Farm ranked up there with other mid-century iconic toys like the Etch-A-Sketch, the Slinky, and Play-Doh. But early ant farms were strictly for natural history purposes. Starting in the 1860s, naturalists in Europe began keeping ants in glass containers with soil and food to study their behavior. Ant hills, nests, or colonies are called formicariums or formicaries by researchers who study ants (myrmecologists), and these formicaria were moved indoors to create artificial ones.

For the Victorian Era, studying natural history generally, and insects in particular, was not only an educational pursuit but also associated with status. Ants, specifically, were seen as “moral” insects. They were orderly, industrious, and cooperative. Almost civilized.

The first inklings of what would become ant farms came about in the 1730s. Naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur studied ants by collecting fragments of their colonies and keeping them in containers. His Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes brought readers through his process. By the 1810s, Swiss scientist Pierre Huber used glass containers, including glass panes with soil sandwiched between them, to store entire ant colonies. He even built space for plants that would be infested with aphids to feed these ant colonies. His Recherches sur les mœurs des fourmis (1810) describes his methods of collecting and rearing the ants in artificial formicariums.

The earliest formicarium building instructions were probably from 1868. Frederic H. Ward created instructions for building one to watch ants “without having to put yourself in a markedly uncomfortable position.” He created what was essentially an aquarium — a box with four glass sides filled with soil and ants. He made his design without a closed top and with a base consisting of a water-filled trough to prevent the ants from escaping. He emphasized careful construction, proper soil, and especially the challenge of introducing ants (including queens and brood), noting their initial panic before they “retire into the case and commence to found a new colony.” He noted that his invention provided “instruction and information…not to speak of the amusement it would afford,” alluding to a future in which glass, and then plastic-walled formicariums, would become common children’s toys. For Ward and other ant enthusiasts who followed his instructions, formicariums built in the 1860s and 1870s were designed for science. [1]

Newspapers at the time were starting to understand the potential popularity of these structures. One paper notes that “the original and ingenious idea…whereby we may introduce a colony of ants into our drawing-room,” was a great way to watch the ants while also keeping them out of the kitchen so as to avoid the “extreme annoyance many London housewives.” [2]

Naturalists such as the Rev. W Farren White, Charles Janet, and Sir John Lubbock wrote about what they saw in the glass formicariums on their desks, including mating, rearing of young, and even “toilet habits” as H.C. McCook studied. They each put their own spin on designs that helped modern ant farms flourish. At the same time, Vicrtotian society generally was taking a keen interest in nature and science, and aquariums, vivariums, and terrariums had become the vogue. Several formicariums were put on display at public events, including the Horticultural Exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1892. [3]

Women entomologists and zoologists at the time had an incentive to turn primitive large formicariums into compact, portable designs. Edith Buckingham was a pioneering zoologist, as well as a dog breeder and chicken farmer, along with her partner Emily G. Fish. Adele M. Fielde was a missionary and biologist who contributed greatly to the growing body of research on ants.

Deborah R. Coen, in her paper The Experimental Multispecies Household, [4] summarized how the lives of these women transformed the formicarium:

These single women shifted their research sites frequently, accepting lab space and teaching positions where they could find them. Buckingham opened her study of “the division of labor among ants” by noting that she had conducted her investigations over the course of six years at six different locations between Long Island and Maine. Often these women’s small living quarters had to serve their research needs as well. For them, compact, easily transported nests were a necessity.

By 1905, the large glass, wood, and plaster formicariums surrounded by a moat had been transformed into travel-ready versions. They debuted as children’s toys at Gamage’s department store, an icon of London shopping, under the name Lubbock Formicarium. It was named after Sir John Lubbock (by that time named Baron Avebury), a well-known scientist, politician, and friend of Charles Darwin. He’s also helped make formicariums famous through his research and publications.

Local newspapers and magazines of the time celebrated the new toy.

“These formicariums not only afford pleasure to children, but offer opportunities for scientific study,” wrote The Youth’s Companion. [5] “An ants’ nest is surely the ‘last word’ in strange pets or curious Christmas presents,” the Cambridge Daily News announced. [6] “There are hundreds of novel ideas in Gamage’s great Christmas bazaar, but none of them has a more fascinating interest than ‘the Lubbock Formicarium,’” the St. James’s Gazette proclaimed. [7]

In the United States, Good Housekeeping announced the formicarium as a novelty: [8]

The latest addition to the toy shop in England consists of a box not unlike a roughly made picture frame, about twelve inches square and three inches in depth, with a glass front. Between the glass and the back is a space a quarter of an inch deep, which is filled with earth, and in which several hundreds of ants may be observed, busily engaged in following their avocations.

Since the “formicarium” was put on the London market thousands have been sold, Edward VII being amongst its delighted purchasers.

By the 1930s, the first mass-produced ant farms were introduced. Frank E. Austin was a retired Dartmouth professor who had opened his workshop to neighborhood boys to build birdhouses, and after meeting a boy interested in ants, he decided to build an “Ant House.” Austin had retired early from Dartmouth in the late 1920s, and the stock market crash of 1829 wiped him out. His ant house design was a way to make a living.

On June 21, 1929, Austin filed for a patent for his ant house, which read, in part, “This invention relates to educational devices, and has particular reference to an apparatus for facilitating the observation, study and photography of subterranean life, especially the life and habits of insects and smaller animals who live underground.”

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine [9] wrote a description of the ant house in a 1937 feature on Austin:

First Mr. Austin built a wooden frame about 18 inches square and placed two panes of glass for the front and back panels, which left a couple of inches of space between. Into the empty space he threw some coarse sand, a layer of sawdust, and some plain Hanover-New Hampshire-South- Park-Street dirt.

His patent was approved in 1931. While the patent pitched and an ant house as an educational tool, soon Austin was creating versions decidedly marked as toys. He created the Ant Coal Mine, the Ant Fire Department, the Ant Palace, and even the Ant Polar Expedition.

Austin paid school children $4 a quart to collect ants for the ant houses, which reached a peak of 400 sales per day in the 1930s. Austin preferred large carpenter ants for shipping ant houses. [10] It was estimated at the time that 3.6 million ants per year were collected by children. “The boxes are used not only for study, but amusement. They are selling so fast I welcome ants from anyone. But they must be the large black carpenter species,” Austin told the Record in 1937. [11]

Austin’s ant houses appeared to generate sales without much marketing, and by the 1940s, few mentions of them appeared in print. During that time, other entrepreneurs got into the business. Thomas T. Barber of Denver, Colo., started his business with the “Anterium” in 1936. As Austin’s ant houses fell out of popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, the Anterium became the primary formicarium product on the market. [12]

Barber started his business in his garage with the help of his son, William, for whom the ant business paid for college at the University of Colorado. [13] The Barbers used the Western Harvester Ant, Pogonomyrmex occidentalis. It was a curious choice, as the species is relatively docile yet very venomous. [14] In fact, the genus has some of the most potent insect venom in nature, though, because of its small size, it causes only intense pain and rarely any lasting damage. While transporting the antariums to Canada, the Barbers ran afoul of Canada’s invasive species laws in 1938 when a shipment to New Brunswick was intercepted. The USDA allowed ant-collecting and rearing businesses to ship ants across the United States, provided no queens were shipped. Workers cannot reproduce, so the risk of colonies establishing was nil.

The anteriums appeared to have had their heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s, and the cost made them a bit of a luxury toy. By the late 1950s, a newcomer to the formicarium business would catapult it to the top of the toy market and make the “Ant Farm” a household name.

Milton Levine was an entrepreneur of all things toys, mainly cheap and mass-produced novelty toys. He was at a Fourth of July picnic in Los Angeles in 1956, and marveled at the ants toiling away underfoot. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2002, [15] recounting the career of the then 88-year-old toy wholesaler, Levine said, “When I was a kid, I used to go to my uncle’s farm and put ants in a jar and watch them cavort. Then we saw a bunch of ants in the corner of the house in Studio City and I said we should make an antarium.”

What Levine omitted from these stories is that “Antarium” was already in use. The consummate marketer, Levine related that the name “antarium” was not quite the right fit (in fact, it has been trademarked by Barber for at least a decade at that point). He decided to call it the Ant Farm.

Instead of the glass and wood that made up the Austin’s Ant Houses and Barber’s Antariums, Levine mass-produced the Ant Farm out of plastic. The Ant Farm business was a family affair; his brother-in-law, C. E. Joseph Cossman, was his partner. Cossman was a key part of the ant-collecting part of the Ant Farm business.

Levine and Cossman used the California Harvester Ant, yet again, a highly venomous ant with such powerful chemicals that it was used in Chumash rituals to induce delirium. [16], [17]

Levine saw huge marketing opportunities. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he went on the Merv Griffin Show, the Dick Clark Show, and the Shari Lewis Show. “I spoke to Lamb Chop for a half an hour about ants,” he told the Times. “I felt like an idiot.”

To avoid being called “Ant Milton,” he rebranded himself and the business as Uncle Milton, and Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm would become one of the most well-known toys of the last half of the 20th century, with more than 20 million sold by the time Levine sold the company in the 1990s. [18]

How a box of dirt and ants became a phenomenon involved several cultural forces at work at the same time.

Since ancient Greece, ants have been seen as standins for hard work and discipline. Aesop’s fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper is perhaps the most famous example of this theme. For parents in the 1950s, with that decade’s rigidity and focus on middle-class white values, ant watching was the reinforcement of those values in the home.

World War II marked an unprecedented expansion of large-scale systems—government, manufacturing, and suburbanization—in the United States. The ant colony, captured in a plastic container and set on a child’s desk, was the perfect reflection of this rapid change in society.

In addition, the ant has long been coopted by Christianity as the model of productivity. As Proverbs 6:6-8 preaches, “Go to the ant you sluggard; consider her ways and be wise; who, having no guide, overseer or ruler, provides her bread in the summer and gathers her food in the harvest.”

The Ant Farm fit perfectly into the hegemony of the Protestant work ethic.

Though the Ant Farm seemed compatible with post-war capitalist values, that wasn’t always the case. Comparisons to socialism and communism were uncommon but also predictable. The ant colony, with its order, hard work, and specialization, was seen by nature writers, entomologists, and sociologists as a natural example of the benefits of collectivism.

Famed Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin penned a treatise on ants and mutual aid in 1901. He anthropomorphized the ants into anti-capitalist, anti-Hobbesian examples of mutual aid societies. [19]

The ants and termites have renounced the “Hobbesian war,” and they are the better for it. Their wonderful nests, their buildings, superior in relative size to those of man; their paved roads and overground vaulted galleries; their spacious halls and granaries; their corn-fields, harvesting and “malting” of grain; their rational methods of nursing their eggs and larvæ, and of building special nests for rearing the aphides whom Linnæus so picturesquely described as “the cows of the ants”; and, finally, their courage, pluck, and, superior intelligence – all these are the natural outcome of the mutual aid which they practise at every stage of their busy and laborious lives.

Even Levine saw it in his own Ant Farm, and inexplicably made the case in his media tours and marketing despite the ongoing Cold War. In 1970, he wrote “Ant Facts and Fantasies” a 12-page pamphlet for the Ant Farm. “This writer is of the opinion that ants are truly Socialist,” he wrote. “After all, their life is truly a communal one.”

This wasn’t a one-off for Levine. In 1989, he tried to break into the Soviet market and his primary selling point was that ants are communists. “The ant farms should sell well in the Soviet market. After all, the ant society is the purest form of socialism,” he’s quoted as saying in the Journal of Commerce. [20]

Culturally, some of the opposite also occurred. In the capitalist West, people living under communism and authoritarianism were often called “ant hills” or “ant heaps” in a nod to the strict conformity of those societies. Ronald Reagan, in a 1964 stump speech in support of Barry Goldwater, called out communism as an “ant heap of totalitarianism.” [21]

Under communism, Australian war hero turned broadcaster J.M. Prentice, stated in 1953, “Humanity is thus reduced to the standard of the ant heap or the bee hive.” [22] Newspaper clippings also occasionally delved into similar rhetoric. The crux of the matter: Communism strips people of their individuality until we are all nameless ants toiling away.

Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm is still sold by toy maker Basic Fun, and the market has a myriad of other options from the Ant Shack to the Ant Vault. Levine died in 2011 at age 97. Despite his comparisons of ants to socialists, he was thoroughly capitalist.

“I never step on an ant because they put three of my children through college,” was a common catchphrase of his. [23]