0:00 In June of 1816, it snowed six inches in Quebec City.0:03 In July and August, lake and river ice was reported as far south as Pennsylvania.0:09 Last week we talked about the Pig War, and how one tiny, almost absurd action nearly sparked a war between two empires.0:18 This story is the inverse.0:19 It's about one single, monumental event that no one could control, and how its shockwave quietly, completely, re-engineered the world.0:29 The event was the eruption of Mount Tambora, on an island in what is now Indonesia, in April of 1815.0:36 And when I say eruption, I mean the largest, most violent volcanic explosion in at least ten thousand years.0:44 The sound was heard over sixteen hundred miles away.0:48 It blasted so much rock and ash into the sky that it created a column twenty-seven miles high, punching right into the stratosphere.0:57 And here’s the key: it wasn't the ash that fell back to earth that changed the world.1:03 It was the gas.1:04 Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide, which reacted with water vapor in the upper atmosphere to form a haze...1:12 a kind of planetary shroud of sulfate aerosols.1:15 This veil wrapped around the globe and just...1:19 stayed there.1:20 Reflecting sunlight back into space.1:22 For the next two years, the entire planet was running on a dimmer switch.1:27 Global temperatures dropped by as much as three degrees Celsius.1:32 And that brings us to 1816.1:34 The Year Without a Summer.1:36 In New England, they called it "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death." Farmers planted their crops in May, and a frost killed them.1:45 They planted again in June, and a blizzard buried them.1:49 In Ireland, the incessant, chilling rain caused the potato crop to rot in the ground, triggering a famine that killed tens of thousands and presaged the Great Famine to come.2:02 In Switzerland, the grain failed completely.2:05 People were eating moss and cats.2:07 Food riots broke out across Europe.2:10 It was a global agricultural collapse, and nobody understood why.2:14 They blamed sunspots, they blamed Benjamin Franklin's new lightning rods...2:20 they blamed God.2:21 No one connected the starving horses in Vermont to a mountain exploding a year earlier, half a world away.2:28 But here’s the part that still gets me.2:31 Out of all that misery, that cold and that darkness, came a burst of creativity and invention that we are still living with today.2:40 Think about that miserable, rainy summer in Switzerland.2:44 A group of wealthy, young English tourists are trapped in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva.2:51 They can't go boating, they can't go hiking.2:54 They're bored.2:55 The group includes the poet Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's 18-year-old future wife, Mary Godwin.3:03 To pass the time, Byron proposes a contest: who can write the best ghost story?3:09 And out of that gloomy, volcano-haunted summer, Mary Shelley has a waking nightmare and begins to write a story about a scientist who creates life and is horrified by the result.3:22 She starts writing Frankenstein.3:24 In that same contest, Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, writes a story called "The Vampyre," which creates the template for the aristocratic, seductive vampire that Dracula would later perfect.3:38 Two of our most enduring modern myths...3:41 born from the boredom of a volcanic winter.3:44 Even the sky itself became art.3:46 The atmospheric dust created these spectacular, fiery red and yellow sunsets that lasted for years.3:53 If you look at the paintings of the British artist J.M.W.3:57 Turner from that period, the skies are just… incandescent.4:01 For a long time, art historians thought he was just being dramatic.4:06 Now, atmospheric scientists have analyzed his work and said, no, that is EXACTLY what the sky looked like.4:14 He wasn't just painting a feeling; he was painting the aerosols.4:18 But the most direct, the most...4:20 mechanical consequence of Tambora?4:23 The invention of the bicycle.4:25 This is the pattern I want you to see.4:28 The logic is brutal and direct.4:30 The failure of the oat harvest across the Northern Hemisphere meant there was nothing to feed the horses.4:37 So, horses, the primary engine of land transportation for thousands of years, either starved or were slaughtered for food.4:46 It created a massive crisis of mobility.4:49 So a German baron, a civil servant named Karl von Drais, started looking for a solution.4:55 If you can't afford a horse, what's next?4:58 In 1817, he unveiled his invention: the Laufmaschine, or "running machine." It was a wooden frame with two wheels, and you propelled it by pushing your feet against the ground.5:11 No pedals, no chain.5:12 It looked...5:13 kinda silly.5:14 But it worked.5:15 It was a personal, mechanical replacement for the horse.5:19 It was the first bicycle.5:21 A volcano in Indonesia makes it cold.5:23 The cold kills the crops.5:25 The dead crops starve the horses.5:28 The starving horses create a need for a new machine.5:31 We tend to see history as a story of ideas or politics.5:35 But sometimes, it's just geology.5:38 Sometimes, the future isn't designed in a boardroom.5:41 It's an improvised, desperate solution to a problem you never saw coming, written in the ashes of a world that just disappeared.
