Top Five Things that Happened During the Year Without a Summer
by Ernie on 04/02/10 at 9:53 am
Backstory: large volcanic eruptions in 1815 essentially cancelled summer in the northern hemisphere in 1816, and frost destroyed a large percentage of crops. The subsequent fall and winter were even more brutal. This caused the last non-politically-related famine in Europe. A number of other important things happened during that summer and fall, which may or may not have been related to the lack of summer.
5. Robert Stirling completed the Stirling Engine, a very important tool in the Industrial Revolution.
4. Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin Shelley, and John Polidori took a holiday in Switzerland. It was ruined by the cold and damp. Since they couldn’t go out, they stayed inside and held a ghost-story-writing contest. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the climax of which took place in the frozen north, and John Polidori, their physician, wrote The Vampyre, the tale from which all modern, sexy vampire stories derive.
3. Justus von Liebig, then a young boy, was one of many who experienced hunger and malnutrition that year. He became a chemist and later studied ways to make land more fertile. He discovered that nitrogen played an important role in plant development and began its use as a fertilizer.
2. Joseph Smith experienced crop failure due to frost in his New England home and decided to move his family south, to upstate New York. This precipitated a series of events that led to the founding of the Mormon Church.
1. Karl Drais, spurred by the shortage of grain for horses, perfected a horseless form of transportation—the velocipede, which was a predecessor to the bicycle.
