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The science of seawater. Maintaining tropical marine fishes was still difficult throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. As a result, saltwater aquariums were rare curiosities that could not be located far from tropical coastal areas. This wasn’t a minor obstacle that kept a small handful of landlocked hobbyists from pursuing their pastime. It was a serious challenge for educators and researchers who needed to keep marine organisms in a lab environment in order to conduct controlled experiments. A salt solution. Everything changed in 1964. That’s when William Kelley, a former director of The Cleveland Aquarium, founded Aquarium Systems, Incorporated (ASI). The company was rooted in the science of seawater from the very beginning. Kelley’s goal was not to replicate natural seawater exactly, but to use its fundamental chemistry as a guideline to create a synthetic marine environment that would sustain life reliably and consistently from one aquarium to the next. Using a formula based on one obtained from a prominent scientist at the Frankfurt Zoo, Kelley eventually achieved his goal, creating a synthetic sea salt that maintained invertebrates indefinitely. He called his innovation Instant Ocean