Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Frankenstein Versus the Volcano

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

When Mount Tambora erupted it spewed ash across the globe; blotting out the sun; poisoning crops; and bringing starvation, illness and death to millions. It may also have helped inspire great scientific and cultural advances - including the horror masterpiece Frankenstein. How well do we adapt to catastrophe and what are the limits of our ability to weather even the worst circumstances?  For a full list of sources go to timharford.com If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin It was sunset when the Lieutenant Governor of Java, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, heard the thunderous explosion. He assumed it was the sound of canon, perhaps the wily French, seeking to wrestle colonial control of the Indonesian archipelago away from the British. In response to the detonations, for hundreds of miles around, British officials were sending out troops to look for invaders, or warships to look for pirates, or rescue boats to look for shipwreck survivors. The Javanese locals saw things differently. They thought one of Javas many volcanoes was erupting. That was a better guess, the noise was coming

from a volcano, but like the colonial occupiers, they assumed the source of the noise was nearby. Nobody could quite grasp that the earth's shattering roar was coming from Mount Tambora. Mount Tambora was thought to be extinct, or to the point, Mount Tambora was producing the cacophony from 800 miles away. It was April the 5th, 1815, and Tambora was just getting started. A few days later, after nightfall, it erupted again. Larva sprayed up in gigantic fountains before engulfing the entire mountain in flames. An hour later, the glow of those flames was shrouded in ash and dust.

And still, the eruption continued. The air above the mountain was superheated, carrying a column of ash many miles into the atmosphere. of ash many miles into the atmosphere, as more air rushed in to fill the void, the infernal vortex sucked in forces and cattle, trees and people. The surge of lava into the sea caused 15-foot-hide tsunamis that scoured the region while the meeting of cold ocean and searing rock created violent steam explosions. Ash and pumice covered the oceans. Eventually drifting 2,000 miles away, behind the impenetrable cloud of dust, the top 3,000 feet of the mountain had been obliterated.

and have been obliterated. Mount Tambora's eruption had been 100 times more violent than that of Mount St. Helens in 1980, or Vesuvius, which destroyed Pompeii in the year 79. Tens of thousands of times more violent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After a night of unimaginable ferocity, dawn was scarcely visible. The ashes now began to fall in showers, wrote the captain of a British ship 300 miles away, and the appearance altogether was truly awful and alarming.

He described the dark rena as a perfect, impalpable powder or dust that gave off a synged odour. The sailors had to shovel tons of the stuff into the harbor to prevent the ship from sinking under the weight. The darkness was so profound throughout the remainder of the day that I never saw anything equal to it in the darkest night. It was impossible to see your hand when held up close to the eye. The ash cloud was now nearly the size of the United States. With the sun blotted out, temperatures in Java had fallen by 20 degrees Fahrenheit. An inch of ash is enough to destroy crops, but for miles and miles around the ash lay a yard deep. The human cost of the explosion was terrible. 12,000 people

had died the night of the largest eruption in the torrent of superheated gas ash and rock. the night of the largest eruption in the torrent of superheated gas ash and rock. Tens of thousands more would die as the ash poisoned the air, the water, and the food. The death toll in the Indonesian archipelago was nearly 90,000 people. It would be many weeks before anyone in Europe or America even knew about the calamity, but the echoes of the colossal eruption would not be quick to fade. Mount Tambora would reshape the world, then the story had barely begun. I'm Tim Haafard and you're listening to cautionary tales. When the volcano exploded, the young Londoner Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin was 17 years old, and her love life flowed as hot and dangerous as any lava. She was the daughter of the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecroft, but her mother had died

when Mary was just a newborn. William Godwin remarried and struggled financially even in the early 1800s philosophy didn't pay. Mary first met Percy Bisch Shelley three years before Tambora erupted. They would secretly visit her mother's grave in St. Pancras Churchyard in London, and they would read the Great Woman's works, such as a vindication of the rights of women. The Churchyard seems to have been a venue for other activities too since Mary soon became pregnant. The two of them eloped with Mary's stepsister Claire Claremont, who had her own designs on Shelley.

Shelley's wife Harriet, also pregnant, was left behind. Mary's first pregnancy ended in tragedy. Her daughter was born prematurely. She nursed the baby for 11 days. Her men, her diary recorded. I woke in the night to give it suck. It appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. Followed in the morning by, find my baby, dead. By the summer of 1816, Mary was pregnant again, still with Percy Shelley and with Claire

Claremont still in tow. The three of them had joined what some people called the League of Incessed, and such rumours did credibly swirl around their companion Lord Byron. The League of Incest was completed by Byron's personal doctor John Polidori, and the air was thick with sexual tension. Claire had slept with Shelley and was pregnant by Byron, and had ambitions to renew at least one of those relationships, and perhaps both. John Polidori was certainly keen to sleep with Mary, which Shelley might well have encouraged Shelley being that sort of poet. Byron himself had designs on Percy Shelley. The scent of scandal around all of them was so strong that they decided to leave England altogether.

They converged on the shores of Lake Geneva in May 1816. Byron's party was staying at the Villa Diodati, Shellis's party nearby, and the two groups spent a great deal of time together. In the Swiss summer, Lake Geneva is ordinarily an idyllic area. They would have gone boating, slept in meadows in the sunshine, and admired the Alpine peaks as they sparkled against the blue sky. Not that year. Never was a scene more desolate. Wrote Mary of her journey to Geneva. The trees in these regions are incredibly large and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness. The vast expanse of snow was checkered only by these gigantic pines and the poles that

marked our road. No river or rock encircled lawn relieved the eye. After the snow came the incessant rain. The group rarely traveled, and when they did, they saw desperate peasants roaming, begging for food. Then one day, shelling on Byron went sailing on the lake, a sudden storm nearly drowned them both. With the external worlds rather lacking in jollity, the group stayed inside, trapped by the

oppressive conditions, talking, reading, violently arguing, Polodori even challenged Shelley to a duel which Shelley laughed off. In various pairings they flirted with a smoldering intensity. Shelley and Byron talked of science and philosophy. Polidori explained the new ideas of galvanism, jerking corpses into movement by applying electric current. Many and long were the conversations. Said Mary Godwin. To which I was a devout but nearly silent listener.

Various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others others the nature of the principle of life. Outside, the thunderstorms raged, the lightning throwing the mountains around them from deep darkness into harsh light. That heady mix of sex and loss, philosophy and poetry, drab confinement and the spectacles of nature was to produce something extraordinary. One night at the Villa Diodati, Byron challenged his group of friends, lovers and rivals to each write a ghost story. The rivalry, the lust, the psychodrama, the darkness, it must have been intoxicating. One evening, during a dramatic reading by Byron, Percy Shelley had a panic attack, screaming at a vision of a woman with eyes staring out at her breasts from where her nipples should have been. John Polidori used this fit of fantasy in his story The Vampire, which influenced

Dracula. But it's not the vampire that's most remembered from the ghost story contest. It's Mary Godwin's novel, Frankenstein. A work which she imagined and started to write at Lake Geneva, and which is so much more than a ghost story. It's an account of a man who conjures life through the power of science and who abandons his own creation, and of the suffering of the creature he creates and rejects, and of the wickedness, cruelty, and murder that result. The work was initially published anonymously, with a preface by Percy Shelley, who was by then Mary's husband. It both captivated and scandalized its readers. In a preface to

a later edition, Mary God Shelley, felt obliged to explain, How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to die later upon so very hideous an idea. It had come to her in a dream, she wrote, which it's not really an explanation at all. She dreamed of other things too. She dreamed that her baby had merely been cold, that she had placed it near the fire, and rubbed it, and that she'd brought it back to life. But no. In her diary, she mournfully described the dream, adding, Awake, and find no baby.

It's not hard to see the inspiration for the novel. Crucial scenes of which are set in Geneva, Poladori's explanations of galvanism, and the poetry bros debating the nature of life itself, prompting the conceit of the novel. Byron, as the wild, selfish, irresponsible Victor Frankenstein, the starving peasants as the outcast creature, Mary's own experience of creating life and experiencing great loss. All this imagined against the backdrop of awe-inspiring electrical storms. That year without summer had given us a story for the ages. But the human cost of that spectacular backdrop had been greater than Mary or any of them

could possibly know. Lake Geneva was not the only place to suffer bad weather in the months after Tambora erupted. Snow fell in Tadamo, Italy. The heaviest snow ever known in that country, said one report. But it wasn't really the quantity. It was the colour. If hell ever freezes over, that's how the snow will look. Sandy yellow, brick red, and a fleshy pale brown. When the snow melted, it left a light powder,

punctious to the touch, with an astringent taste. That taste would have been familiar to the farmers around Mount Tambora, the acid tang that poisoned everything. The bad weather continued. In Western and Central Europe, rainfall in June 1816 was twice what was normal. August was very wet too. Throughout the summer, the temperature was 3-7 degrees Fahrenheit lower than usual. It doesn't sound too bad, but for many peasants, it was the difference between food and starvation. Grapes did not ripen on the vine, while grain, turnips and potatoes rotted in the ground, or in bans and silos.

In Italy, the hills were still covered with snow in April, making it impossible to so wheat. In Austria, late frosts stunted the crops. In Scotland, farmers brought their cattle to market early. The alternative was to let them starve for one to fodder. The weather has been unusually barren, noted one report in May, adding that the fields are backward and a great want of warm sun. Britain had laws to restrict the import of grain, swelling the profits of influential

farmers, now with a weak domestic harvest, the price of wheat, soared. There was rioting in several parts of England, 1500 demonstrators in Norfolk armed themselves with spiked clubs, and a banner reading, bread, or blood. While the most spectacular changes in climate were experienced in Western Europe, other parts of the world also felt the effects. A New England clockmaker, Chuanci Jerome, walked to work in Plymouth, Connecticut, through six inches of snow in a heavy overcoat in Mittens. It was June. When the summer snows came, Vermont farmers, who'd shorn their sheep, desperately tried to tie the fleece

back on. It was usually in vain. The animals froze, so did the birds. In Salem, Massachusetts, temperatures topped 100 degrees in late June, but then fell below freezing again, with frosts destroying the crops. The severe cold spell was followed by drought. By September, people were beginning to starve. On the other side of the world, in Yunnan, southwest China, the rice crop failed, causing widespread famine, with the grain reserves of imperial China finding it impossible to cope.

When the weather improved a couple of years later, some farmers gave up on rice. They switched to a crop they regarded as more reliable. Poppies. Producing a rich harvest of opium. At the time nobody realised the main cause of these catastrophes. We now understand that it was Mount Tambora's eruption. Scientists estimate that 30-40 cubic miles of ash were rejected, enough to bury Rhode Island under 50 yards of rubble. And long after the ash sank back to Earth, Sulphur dioxide from the eruption lingered high in the stratosphere, 10 miles and more above sea level. The sulphur dioxide formed a fine mist of dilute sulfuric acid, which persisted for a year

or more and cooled the earth by reflecting back the sun's rays. The circulation of the atmosphere itself shifted, making some areas wetter and some drier, disrupting the harvest either way. You can even see the traces of Mount Tambora in the colours used by landscape artists. Scientists have examined the colour choices used across 500 years of painting, and conclude that after dramatic eruptions changed the composition of the stratosphere, the skies are depicted using more red paint. Those famous fiery skies by the British painter Turner depict the afterglow of Mount Tambora. But while the skies were beautiful, the cost in human life from this temporary shift in the climate was

appalling. Typhus broke out as a result of hunger, killing 65,000 people in Ireland and Britain. In India, heavy rains worsened an epidemic of cholera, which spread as far north as Moscow and south as Indonesia, where the original eruption had taken place. Around 90,000 people had died there in the aftermath of the disaster in 1815, by some estimates even more died from cholera in 1816 and 1817. Globally, hundreds of thousands perished. I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkly in the eternal space.

Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. These lines are from a poem by Lord Byron, Darkness. Forests were set on fire, but hour by hour they fell and faded, and the crackling trunk sexting wished with a crash, and all was black. Like Frankenstein, it was drafted in what should have been the summer of 1816, if there had been any summer to enjoy. Mawn came and went, and came and brought no day. It's not as brilliant or influential a work as Frankenstein, but it's a striking poem,

another creative response to a terrifying time. And men forgot their passions in the dread of this desolation, and all hearts were chilled into a selfish prayer for light. Loyal listeners to cautionary tales may remember the story of Keith Jarrett's disastrous booking at the Colone Opera House. He arrived at the venue to find a beaten up, almost unplayable piano, but he grudgingly adapted to produce a triumphant performance. If you've heard that story, you won't be surprised at all to hear that the year without summer inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. We first released that episode in December 2019,

just a few days before report started to emerge from China of a worrying new respiratory virus. I still tell the story, and I still find it inspiring and instructive to think about how Jarrett managed to turn disaster into triumph. And yet, I see it a little differently now. I described the unplayable piano as a disaster, but it's not the same kind of disaster as

a global pandemic. It's not the same kind of disaster as a volcanic eruption which derails the world's climate and leaves hundreds of thousands dead from hunger or disease. You can point to the beautiful best-selling, cold and concert album and say, it all turned out brilliantly in the end. But nobody would ever point to Frankenstein as compensation for the cataclysm of Mount Tambora. Yet, while it's no compensation, it is a remarkable response. And I found myself wondering again, what drives this sort of innovative counter thrust in the teeth of catastrophe? Recently, social scientists have tried to chart the different ways in which calamities

teach us lessons. For one thing, trouble breaks us out of our routines. And so we try and approach that we should have been embracing all along. That's what happened when Keith Jarrett, confronted with an unplayable piano, found a new way to perform. But it happens on a grander, graver scale too. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the lives of many survivors were turned upside down. The economist Bruce Sassadote studied the educational

achievement of the children most affected by the hurricane. Unsurprisingly, their test scores fell at first as their lives were disrupted, but after three years, they were actually doing better than before, often because the hurricane had forced their families to move, and they'd ended up in better schools. Three other economists, Tatiana D'Arujina, Laura Coano, and the co-author of Free Kinomics, Steve Levitt, looked at people's earnings after Katrina, and they found a similar pattern, a short-term plunge, followed by people actually starting to earn more than comparison groups in cities that were unaffected.

A very similar pattern was discovered by the economist's Emmy Nakamura, Joseph Sigurdson and John Steinzen, when they examined the devastation of a fishing community in Iceland. In 1973, lava from one of Iceland's many volcanoes simply rolled through the middle of the town. Nobody died, but the lava destroyed the homes that happened to be in its path. Nakamura and her colleagues later concluded that having your childhood home destroyed by lava was worth about $30,000 a year in mid-career earnings, and an extra three and a half years worth of education, that's a degrees worth. As in your leans, the families affected had been more likely to move out.

As in your leans, many of them had benefited unexpectedly as a result. But the creative response to disaster isn't just about being shaken out of old habits. A disaster can also encourage us to invest in a new way of doing things, a new way that would never have been worthwhile before. Think about working from home. In the lockdowns of 2020, many people invested in a better internet connection, web camera, microphone and office chair. We've invested in learning how to use remote working software too.

Without the pandemic, we might not have bothered. But now that we spend all that time and money, it'll be easier to work from home in the future. The effect is made much stronger because we're all dealing with the same problem at the same time. That makes it easier to coordinate on a solution. It's not easy to be the only person working from home, but once lots of people do it, we collectively figure it out. It's a simple point, but if everyone is forced to invest their energy into solving a problem,

once the problem has gone, the solution may still be useful. This leads to a third, more vicious way in which destruction can produce an innovative response. By culling weaker companies, it gives more space to the strong. The COVID lockdown strengthened the big tech firms, in part, by weakening their competitors. Netflix and Disney Plus prospered when cinemas were closed. Amazon thrived when the shopping malls were deserted.

When nobody was walking or driving past billboards, Google's digital advertising looked stronger than ever. So did podcast advertising, I suppose? So, who benefited from Mount Tambora? I'll suggest an answer in just a moment. Mount Tambora didn't just spoil the vacation of some sexy young poets, it killed hundreds of thousands of people and ruined lives all over the world. But did it spark any ideas beyond the world's first and greatest gothic science fiction novel? One or two. beyond the world's first and greatest gothic science fiction novel?

One or two. Three hundred miles away from the ghost stories of the Villa Diodati in Manheim, an inventive young man named Carl Drace had been working on his latest idea. The initials spur had been a bad harvest in 1812, which was followed by other crop failures. 1816, the year without summer, was the worst of the lot. With the bad harvest, the price of oats had soared, and when oats were expensive, so too were horses, few could afford to keep horses now because few could afford to feed them. Now, on the 12th of June 1817, Karl Draise was ready to unveil his alternative. Comfortably seated in its saddle, he zipped halfway to Schvetzingen and back in about

an hour, a round trip of ten miles. A month later, he announced that he would ride the 32 miles between two nearby towns in just four hours. He began his journey at noon, and, as verified by the local police commander, he arrived at four o'clock in the afternoon, perfectly punctual. All very impressive, for a man on a wooden horse. Carl Drase called his invention a lauf machine, a running machine. It's not a bad description.

It was a saddle set on a wooden crossbar. The crossbar itself connected two wheels front and back. The front wheel was steerable by handlebars. There were no pedals. You propelled it with your feet pushing off the ground in great, low-ping strides. The strange invention became known as a hobby horse or a Velosspeed or a Dresien. But these days, we'd call it a primitive bicycle.

The invention made an instant impression. Then several commentators expressed the hope that thanks to the running machine, people would need fewer horses, and the high price of oats would fall. Carl Drase's wooden horse wasn't a perfect alternative to the real thing. It only worked on excellent roads, it lacked brakes, and it was no lat quick anyway. But the cost of oats pushed him to try something. As with today's video conferencing, the idea could be improved once a critical mass of people But the cost of oats pushed him to try something. As with today's video conferencing, the idea could be improved once a critical mass of people were interested.

The more people tried Drases Running Machine, the more likely they would be to demand and get better roads. Today, most people still cannot afford to keep a horse, but most people, even in poor countries, can afford a bicycle. Exactly as Karl Draise believed all along. In fact, bicycles are more popular than ever. In recent years, their production has comfortably outpaced the production of cars. the production of cars. Not far away, in the German town of Darmstadt, another young inventor, Eustus Liebig, learned his trade in his father's chemical workshop. They would concoct paints and polishes and pigments, but 13-year-old Eustus was destined

for much more. When he saw the same awful harvests as Karl Draise, he felt the same impulse. He had to invent something to solve the problem. He was focused less on the fact that people couldn't afford horses, and more on the fact that people couldn't afford supper. Leibig grew up to become one of a handful of scientists who transformed the way people ate. One of his inventions was an early formula for baby milk, a potential lifesaver for babies with no mothers, babies such as Mary Godwin.

Leibig was a pioneer of nutritional science, analyzing food in terms of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. He performed a similar analysis for plants too, helping to show how crops grew lush and strong when given appropriate fertiliser and trace nutrients. His work on beef extract and infant formula came from the same motivation. In a civilized, scientifically advanced world, nobody should be going hungry. For most of Western continental Europe, the crisis of 1816 was the last serious famine. That is largely thanks to Eustus Liebig. Mount Tambora caused untold suffering around the world. It also inspired ideas as diverse as nutritional science, Frankenstein, and the bicycle. I've compared the fallout from Mount

Tambora to the COVID pandemic. It's not hard to see the analogy. Both swept through the world, killing millions, turning our lives upside down for a couple of years, and inspiring some of us to come up with new ways of doing things. But it's impossible to hear the story of how Mount Tambora wreaked havoc on the climate without thinking of another modern parallel. on the climate without thinking of another modern parallel, the changes we're making ourselves. The greenhouse effect produces a much more gradual influence on the climate of course, and it's making the planet hotter, not colder. But it's also an impact that will last much longer than mountain timburas, and perhaps be no less dramatic in its way. and perhaps be no less dramatic in its way. The world was void, the populous and the powerful was a lump.

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless, a lump of death, a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, and nothing stirred within their silent depths. Should we be terrified by the way that nature can wreak such havoc, sometimes with our provocation and sometimes without it? Or should we be inspired by the innovation and resilience we muster in response? I suppose it's possible to feel both at once. For a list of the sources for this episode, please visit the show notes at timhalford.com Corsionary Tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Haafard, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LeBel. Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarrs, Julia Barton, Carly McGleory, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniel LeCarn, and Maya Canig. Corsairry Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends. And if you want to hear the show ads-free and listen to four exclusive Corsairry Tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm-plus.