Phytotron

After that, phytotron technology compressed whole environments into smaller cabinets able to be set to any desired combination of environmental conditions, which are still in use today.

It acquired its more distinctive nickname evidently from a joking conversation between Caltech biologists James Bonner and Sam Wildman.

Recalling the origin sometime in 1980s Bonner noted that: "The Earhart Plant Research Laboratory [was] called an environmentally controlled greenhouse but my first postdoctoral fellow [Sam Wildman] and I, sitting around about 1950, having coffee, decided it deserved a better or more euphonious name [...].

"[2] Phytotrons spread around the world between 1945 and the present day to Australia, France, Hungary, the Soviet Union, England, and the United States.

Moreover, they have spurred variants such as the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Biotron at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Ecotron at Imperial College London and the Brisatron at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory.