For around a thousand years, Mount Tambora, located on Sumbawa Island in the Dutch East Indies, had remained dormant until its eruption in April 1815. The blast propelled ash and volcanic gases to an elevation within the stratosphere. They reacted in a manner different from ordinary weather. They could not be rained out. They spread. According to one report, it took eighteen months for the sulphate aerosol layer to circulate globally. It created a molecular barrier that reflected sunlight back to space, allowing the Earth's heat to dissipate. Until early 1818, the screen remained undisturbed. The planet ran cold for three years.
The Summer That Never Came
The 1810s were the coldest decade in recorded history. In 1816 specifically, at ground level, that meant summer never arrived. In New England, people began calling it "Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death." In June, Albany, New York, experienced a snowfall. Massachusetts suffered from frost-caused crop damage in both May and August. The cost of oats in the United States increased from twelve cents per bushel in 1815 to ninety-two cents the following year. Across Europe, which was still grappling with the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the harvest failure was devastating. Some estimates place the death count from the eruption and its immediate aftermath at more than 100,000 individuals.
In 1817, a military observer traversing the Rhine region recounted his observations, noting that the people were barely human, scrounging for half-rotten potatoes in the fields. In England, armed labourers went on a march with banners displaying "Bread or Blood." According to one report, some Swiss families, desperate for survival, killed their own children.
The Horse Dies. The Bike Is Born.
The lack of oats led to horses going without food. Horses served as the driving force behind European transportation and industry. When they died, movement slowed. Karl Drais was a mathematician and inventor who lived in Mannheim. The Rhine experienced repeated flooding that year. He began developing a human-powered alternative to horse-drawn vehicles. Most accounts indicate that it was the direct collapse of horse-based transport that propelled him towards it.
He named what he constructed the Laufmaschine, or running machine: a two-wheeled frame a rider could straddle and push along the ground with their feet. It did not have pedals. It featured a simple brake. It came into existence in 1817.
A Ghost Story Needs Bad Weather
Since June, a group of young writers had been confined indoors near Lake Geneva. The weather was extremely harsh, with one letter-writer likening the bodily impact of the thunderclaps to a heart attack. At that time, Mary Godwin, aged just eighteen and unmarried to Percy Shelley, was there alongside Percy, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori. There is debate over the exact night when the ghost story contest commenced. One highly detailed account places it on June 18, 1816; others say it was in July. Byron depicted a vampire. Polidori eventually released it, although there are varying accounts of whether he created it independently or stole Byron's original concept. Mary initiated the story that would eventually be titled Frankenstein. This story centers on a scientist who creates life during a storm but is unable to confront what he has produced.
While on a walking tour of Alpine Switzerland that summer, Byron and Percy Shelley noticed village children who were, in their words, crooked and with enlarged throats. The creature in Frankenstein is described as deformed, twisted, and enlarged. Whenever he sets foot in towns, he encounters horror and is forced to flee. In the novel, the creature informs his creator of his initial suffering from the cold, and then from the cruelty of the people he came across. The cold was real.
The Myth They All Reached For
At nearly the same time that Mary was penning Frankenstein, Schubert was crafting a cantata titled Prometheus, Byron was writing a poem named Prometheus, and Percy Shelley was starting work on Prometheus Unbound. Four artists, all chasing the same myth from a vanished summer: the figure who snatches fire from the gods and ends up being punished for sharing it with humans. Only one source makes this connection explicitly. It is unclear whether anyone noticed.
What the Disaster Left Behind
The writers near Lake Geneva remained unaware of Drais's existence. Neither group was aware of why things had gone so awry during the summer. That summer's bicycle is now one of the most widely promoted responses to climate change. The same disaster that deprived horses of food gave birth to the machine that replaced them. That the replacement was recognized as a climate tool two centuries later could either be indicative of a meaningful pattern or mere coincidence. It is unclear which.