Life of John Claudius Loudon his wife

Work on hothouses and conservatories

In August, 1815, a paper had been published in the Transactions of the Horticultural Society, by Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, "on the form which the glass of a forcing-house ought to have, in order to receive the greatest possible quantity of rays from the sun." This form Sir George conceived to be that of a globe; but, as it seemed impracticable to make a hothouse globular, he proposed to make the roof the segment of a circle. Mr. Loudon appears to have been very much struck with this paper; but he saw faults in the plan which he thought might be amended, and he tried houses with curvilinear roofs of various kinds, in order to ascertain which was the best. He also tried a house with what he called ridge and furrow glazing; a plan which has since been carried out on a magnificent scale by Mr. Paxton, in the Duke of Devonshire's splendid conservatory at Chatsworth. While these houses were in progress, he wrote a work entitled . Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses, &c., which was published in 1817. Shortly afterwards he invented a new kind of sash-bar, of which he gave a description, together with sketches of the hothouses, and details of their construction, in a quarto pamphlet entitled Sketches of Curvilinear Hothouses, &c., which was published in 1818. The profits of this bar he was to have shared with the ironmonger by whom it was sold; but, I believe, he never reaped any pecuniary advantage from it. He also published, in folio, another work, in the same year, entitled A Comparative View of the Common and Curvilinear Modes of roofing Hothouses.