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.
The events
- Raffles founds modern Singapore1819 · Singapore. In January 1819 Thomas Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company landed on a sparsely inhabited island off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. In February he signed a treaty with local rulers and founded a trading post. A duty-free port at the crossroads between India and China, it grew rapidly into one of the world's great harbours.
- Battle of Waterloo1815 · Waterloo. On 18 June 1815 Wellington's allied army and Blücher's Prussians defeated Napoleon. The battle ended the Hundred Days and the Napoleonic Wars, while the Congress of Vienna set up a new order in Europe.
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 · 1817 The bicycle may owe its birth to a volcano.
- 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.