Born in Leipzig and the son of Johann Friedrich Jakob Reichenbach (the author in 1818 of the first Greek-German dictionary) Reichenbach studied medicine and natural science at the University of Leipzig in 1810 and, eight years later in 1818, he the now Professor became an instructor before, in 1820, he was appointed the director of the Dresden natural history museum and a professor at the Surgical-Medical Academy in Dresden, where he remained for many years.

Director of the natural history museum in Dresden, Professor Reichenbach was faced with an annoying yet seemingly unsolvable problem of showing invertebrate marine life.

Land-based flora and fauna was not an issue, for it was a relatively simple matter to exhibit mounted and stuffed creatures such as gorillas and elephants, their lifelike poses attracting and exciting the museums' visitors.

[5] This killed it but, more importantly, time and a lack of hard parts eventually rendered the specimen little more than a colorless floating blob of jelly, making it neither pretty nor an effective teaching tool.

The key fact, though, was that these glass marine models were, as would soon be acknowledged, "perfectly true to nature,"[13] and as such represented an extraordinary opportunity both for the scientific community and the Blaschkas themselves.

A decision which swiftly sparked the Blaschkas' highly lucrative mail-order business of selling Glass sea creatures to interested parties across the globe.

[6] Sadly, however, the original six glass sea anemones purchased by Ludwig Reichenbach in 1863 as well as the rest of that first collection was destroyed in the Bombing of Dresden in World War II.

Dr. Reichenbach oversaw a world-famous botanical garden in Dresden with a great collection of cacti, and Echinocactus reichenbachii a beautiful cactus of the south-central U.S. and northern Mexico was named in his honor.

However, the cemetery administration had not awarded the grave site, so that at the initiative of the Senckenberg Natural History Collections in Dresden, a stele was erected, which was unveiled on September 11, 2011.