1816: The (other) lost summer
This mysterious forgotten year must have been so strange to live through...
Arlen here with your monthly forgotten history newsletter.
Covid has uprooted many people’s lives over the past year. But at least today in 2021 we understand how the virus spreads. And we have important tools like vaccines, masks, and other public health measures to keep ourselves and each other safe.
Still, for a lot of us it feels like a big chunk of time has just been lost.
So this month I want to tell you about the “lost summer” of 1816. A time when much of the world suddenly changed:
Floods in Asia wiped out entire farms, leading to mass famine
The sky color turned to yellow in some parts of the world
Birds in North America dropped dead en masse
Strangely colored blue snow began to fall in the middle of Italy’s springtime
Poor crop yields in Europe caused riots over resources
A mysterious fog descended on parts of the United States, making daytimes dim
Pennsylvania’s rivers froze in summer; in Massachusetts, it snowed in June
In short, stuff got real weird real fast. Dangerously weird.
To make things worse, nobody in the entire world understood why this was happening… or when it would end. Imagine what it must have been like to live through that experience with the scant amount of scientific knowledge the average person must have had back then. The year 1816 was a strange one.
Finally, in the 1960s, scientists figured out what probably happened a century and a half earlier. The explanation historians now believe is this:
One of the biggest volcanic eruptions of all time
The year before the world’s climate turned topsy-turvy, a very rare thing happened in Indonesia.
Mount Tambora, an enormous volcano, experienced what is called a “super-colossal” eruption. It scored a 7 out of 8 on the scientific volcano scale. Prior to that event, the most recent volcanic eruption of that size had been all the way back in the year 1257. (Mercifully, it has not happened since either!)
The local effect in Indonesia was instant. As many as 10,000 people died from the immediate lava flows. That was just the beginning: as the ash rain started, famine, disease, and misery spread for hundreds of miles around. Oh, and the eruption also caused a deadly tsunami too.
As much of the world’s atmosphere became cloudy with volcanic ash and dust from Mt Tambora, the amount of sunlight in the globe’s northern hemisphere was reduced. This led to colder temperatures, which caused those crop failures in many places. Perhaps another 90,000 people died around the world as a result. For many of those who survived, it was likely a miserable year, full of stress and uncertainty.
Remind you of anything in the present day?
Okay, back to the story!
We do not have photographs of what the sky looked like during the “year without a summer.”
Although early photographers were experimenting with camera technology, the oldest surviving photograph we have is from the year 1826– ten years later.
But we do have paintings by artists of the day. Take a look at how the art of German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich changed before and after the volcanic eruption happened.
Here’s his art before the volcano errupted:
And here’s his art afterward:
Wow.
Come to think of it, the sky in that 1817 painting reminds me of how parts of the Western United States and Australia looked recently after the Climate Change-affected wildfires of recent years…
Like the disruptions of Covid today, the year without a summer in 1816 undoubtedly changed many people’s perspective on the world
It was a year they probably never forgot for the rest of their lives. And the ripple effects of that season continued for decades– sometimes in the most unexpected ways:
Lack of grain to feed horses may have led to the 1817 invention of the bicycle as an alternate mode of transportation (Kind of like how Covid has spurred a lot of new developments in Telehealth and other remote events)
With rice yields in China ruined, some farmers turned to growing poppy flowers which could be harvested for opium, leading to all sorts of consequences
And, in Switzerland, an 18 year old woman, a 21 year old doctor prodigy, and a group of creative friends holed up in a rented villa for the gloomy summer…
The young woman wrote in her journal that "It proved a wet, ungenial summer… and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." For entertainment to pass the time they spent indoors on their gloomy summer vacation, one of the group of melancholy vacationers suggested that each try and write a ghost story.
They did.
The young doctor penned what would become the very first published modern vampire story, The Vampyre, a precursor to Dracula. It didn’t win the contest.
The winning entry in this humble villa writing contest came from the young woman, who, after trying and failing to think up a good story idea for days, finally ended up writing what would ultimately turn into a little novel you may have heard of: Frankenstein.
We can’t all be Mary Shelley in the summer of 1816.
But even if we don’t all exit Covid times with a seminal work of art under our belt, perhaps we can all try to find a some new sense of verve– vigor for living.
By the time the summer of 1818 rolled around, many skies around the world were clearing up. Temperatures were returning back to normal and crop yields were too. In my own imagination at least, people back then resolved never to take a sunny day for granted ever again.
So here are some things I want to try not to take for granted once Covid is finally over:
Being able to traveling somewhere. Anywhere! I even miss airports
Going to live theater, the movies, concerts, and restaurants
Seeing people’s faces
No longer being horrified by the daily death count from a preventable virus
Working not-from-home
The feeling of freedom that comes with abruptly choosing to go out and do something without a lot of planning, PPE, or Covid calculus
Seeing people in general. Friends, enemies, strangers, family, everyone
My health (and not needing to worry about my health constantly)
The ability to make firm plans for the future
Fully stocked shelves with groceries, medicine, and cleaning supplies
Above: An April 2020 photo from my Instagram account, where I post one photo each day.
Stay safe and stay healthy, everybody
I’ll be back next month with another forgotten history story.
In the meantime, if you learned something new from this month’s story, please feel free to share this post with a friend or on social media. I also get a happy email alert every time somebody likes this post.
Your pal in history,
Arlen
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I used the eruption of Mt Tambora with my 7th grade science classes as a starting phenomenon for a unit about energy, food webs, and cause and effect. The tidbits about the bicycle, poppies, and Dracula/Frankenstein would have been cool to discuss too. I’m not teaching 7th grade this year, but I’m going to share with my colleagues who are. Thank you!