Saltwater in the Long Ago #4: Modern Technology 1979

[Doug]

It didn't take genius to figure out that, once saltwater aquaria had come to the masses, that products would emerge professing to be the be-all to end-all in cutting-edge marine fish-keeping technology.

The earliest I remember was "Dick Boyd's Chemi-Pure". It came ready-to-use in a nylon mesh bag inside a plastic jar. It was already moist, as if that mattered. We came to learn it was a "high grade activated carbon" along with something called "ion exchange resins". One jar constituted a "unit", and you were supposed to use so many units per gallon of tank size for best results. We observed its ability to clarify cloudy or yellowed tank water literally overnight, and attributed that effect to the carbon. But what of these magic resins? It was explained in product literature that "positive ions" affected fish in deleterious ways, and that beneficial "negative ions", against all conventional wisdom, were actually good for your fish, both physiologically and psychologically. To that end, Chemi-Pure exchanged bad ions for good, and all was supposedly made well in your aquarium for them having done so. Interestingly, a customer at the time was enrolled in a college chemistry class which happened to be undertaking the study of ion exchange resins. A sample of Chemi-Pure was tested and indeed found to exchange "good" ions for "bad", but it also gave off a fair amount of "bad" ions itself, resulting in a perceived null effect. (I cannot vouch for the validity of this testing, and report its results only anecdotally.) Several other similar products subsequently sprang up, none of which actually provided concrete hard science to back up their marketing claims. Lawsuits ensued, and competitors ultimately rebadged their knock-offs to names that didn't sound so much like the apparently still-available Chemi-Pure.

Next: Building The Arsenal, 1980