History
The construction of artificial reefs is thousands of years old. Ancient Persians blocked the mouth of the Tigris River to thwart Indian pirates by building an artificial reef, and during the First Punic War the Romans built a reef across the mouth of the Carthaginian harbor in Sicily to trap the enemy ships within and assist in driving the Carthaginians from the island.
Artificial reefs to increase fish yields or for algaculture have been used at least since 17th century Japan, when rubble and rocks were used to grow kelp, while the earliest recorded construction of artificial reef in the United States is from 1830s when logs from huts were used off the coast of South Carolina to improve fishing.
Since at least the 1830s, American fishermen used interlaced logs to build artificial reefs. More recently, castaway junk, such as old refrigerators, shopping carts, ditched cars, out-of-service vending machines replaced the logs in ad hoc reefs. Officially sanctioned projects have incorported decommissioned subway cars, vintage battle tanks, armored personnel carriers and oil drilling rigs.
Read more about this topic: Artificial Reef
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)