The bicycle may owe its birth to a volcano.
After Tambora erupted in 1815, Europe had its 'year without a summer' and horses died for lack of feed; one theory holds that this is why Karl Drais built his horseless running machine.
The events
- Drais's dandy horse, the first bicycle1817 · Mannheim. In 1817 Baron Karl Drais built a two-wheeled 'running machine', the first bicycle. It had no pedals: the rider pushed off the ground and on a level road reached about 16 km/h, twice walking pace. The English nicknamed it the dandy horse.
- Eruption of Mount Tambora1815 · Sumbawa, Indonesia. In April 1815 Tambora produced the most powerful eruption in recorded history: the mountain lost over a kilometre of height and an estimated 70,000+ people died. Its stratospheric ash cooled the planet. Two months later, Napoleon lost at Waterloo.
More amazing facts
- 1814 · 1815 'The Congress dances, but it does not move forward,' went the joke about the Congress of Vienna: while diplomats spent months carving up post-Napoleonic Europe, Vienna went from ball to ball.
- 1815 Two months before Waterloo, in April 1815, Indonesia's Tambora erupted — its ash brought the 'Year Without a Summer' to Europe and North America.
- 1815 Napoleon's Hundred Days actually lasted 110, from his return to Paris on 20 March 1815 to Louis XVIII's restoration on 8 July.
- 1815 · 1819 Modern Singapore is younger than the Battle of Waterloo: Stamford Raffles set up the British trading post there in 1819, four years after Napoleon's defeat.
- 1816 · 1819 The same rainy summer of 1816 that produced Frankenstein also gave birth to the aristocratic vampire, ancestor of Dracula.
- 1816 The stethoscope was invented out of embarrassment.