In 1957, Harold von Braunhut was suddenly hit by the idea that Brine Shrimp, which were normally sold in pet shops for fish food, could be turned into very popular Instant Pets because of their ability to "go into suspended animation" while not in the proper conditions.

They were first made in 1960 by Honey Toy Industries and they cost 49 US cents. All retailers, especially toy shops, regarded the idea as absolutely stupid and wouldn't even consider stocking them. To keep going while trying to sell them he came up with Invisible Goldfish. This came with a handbook, a bowl, pebbles, and food. Even though the Invisible Goldfish didn't even exist, people were quite happy to buy them and they were a success. Still, he was having problems selling what he called at the time "Instant Pets". So he was forced to make quite a lot of weird inventions (e.g. X-Ray Spex) just to keep going.

He decided to have more advertising. At that time television was a popular medium for advertising, one of the reasons for this was it being so cheap. All the toy companies used this to advertise. Harold wanted to do something different, something that no one else used. He decided to advertise in comic books. Comic books were incredibly cheap and every kid read them. They advertised in Superman, various D.C. comics, Harvey, and Archie. All together they bought 303 million pages of ads every year for quite a number of years. The orginal logo for Instant Life was drawn by Henry Lamore. Subsequent artwork was drawn by Ben Harvey. The result was much better than they could ever have suspected. They got 5 full sacks of mail every day, every letter being an order for a kit. They had huge trouble keeping up with the demand. With the money Harold got from this, he built a factory and filled it with machinery so he could mass manufacture the kits.

By the late 1960's Instant Pets had become so popular that Toy Stores dropped their prejudice and began stocking the kits. At about the same time Honey Toy Industries changed their name to (the now famous) Transcience Corporation. Haorld then decided that the creatures needed a name. Since they had monkey like tails he decided to call them Sea-Monkeys. The image of raising a family of Sea-Monkeys instead of just a few shrimps added to the popularity.

Distribution of the kits was given to the Lamari Corporation in the early 80's. They kept it for a few years until the Sea monkey craze started dying out. Then in 1995 Basic Fun inc. took it over. But that was an absolute failure and they lost it before a year was over. It then went into the hands of ExploraToy, which is a division of Education Insights. George Atamian, who was Vice President and manager of ExploraToy, had lobbied for two years to get the rights for distribution, so he was understandably happy.

Sea Monkeys have spread to foreign countries and are doing well in them as well. In Australia the distribution rights are owned by Moose. They are doing very well here, and they can be found in most Toy shops. Sea Monkeys have been on the market for nearly fourty years now. They have had their ups and downs, but on the average they have done exceptionally well and should continue to do so in the future.