10 Good Things That Happened in the Year Without a Summer

The volcanic winter brought on by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia made 1816 the Year Without a Summer. In a previous list, we enumerated the disruptions inflicted on human society by the famines and diseases unleashed by the Tambora eruption. Yet, not everything about 1816 was gloom and doom.

There were positive aspects as well. We have noted how the notion of social welfare was given a boost in the difficult times. J.M.W. Turner gave us magnificent paintings inspired by the fiery sunsets. In Germany, where famine had decimated the horse population, Karl Freiherr von Drais was driven to invent the prototype of the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation.

Despite the suffering, life went on. People who would one day have an impact on civilization were born. Humanity continued working, learning, creating, and inventing—making progress in many fields and improving life for many.

Related: 10 Doomsday Scenes from the Year Without a Summer

10 Mining Safety Lamp Introduced

Coal mining is a dangerous job, even more so in the early 19th century. Methane gas accumulated deep in the mines and reacted with the flames used by miners for illumination, resulting in explosions that regularly produced horrible casualties. The rector of Bishopwearmouth near Newcastle had seen enough and asked chemist and inventor Humphry Davy to find a solution.

From mid-October to December 1815, Davy experimented with several prototype lamps until he hit on a simple design—enclosing the flame with wire gauze. The holes let light through while absorbing the heat. The heat would not be intense enough to excite the methane gas, making it harmless. In January 1816, Davy’s lamp was successfully tested at Hebburn Colliery and was quickly put into production.

The lamp dramatically decreased the number of accidents and fatalities in coal mines. It also resulted in the production of more coal as it allowed miners to dig deeper into coal seams. It was a significant contribution to the accelerated pace of industrialization in Britain and the rest of the world. Humphry Davy would go on to become the president of the Royal Society.^[1]

9 The Barber of Seville Premieres

The world first heard Figaro’s now well-known operatic aria, reverberating with his own name, at the Teatro Argentina in Rome on February 20, 1816. The premiere of Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville turned out to be a fiasco.

The Italian composer had based his plot on an earlier work by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, which was also used by Giovanni Paisiello for his own opera Barber of Seville. In deference to his rival, Rossini called his opus Almaviva, but Paisiello took it as an affront, anyway, and hired a group of hecklers to jeer and mock the opening performance.

The opera seemed cursed. An actor tripped and bloodied his nose, rocking the audience with laughter. A cat wandered onstage in the finale of Act I and refused to leave—just a cat doing cat things—and had to be forcibly flung into the wings. The evening ended with the crowd chanting, “Paisiello! Paisiello!” Nonetheless, Rossini remained upbeat, writing his mother, “I will tell you that in the midst of it all, the music is very fine, and already people are talking about its second evening…”

Rossini was right. The performance was a triumph, and adoring crowds followed the composer, who mistook them for a mob ready to burn down his lodgings. Rossini hid in a stable and refused to come out. When the opera was revived in Bologna on August 10 after Paisiello’s death, it was permanently retitled The Barber of Seville.^[2]

8 Charlotte Brontë Is Born

“A Christmas frost had come at midsummer: a white December storm had whirled over June…” Thus did Charlotte Brontë describe Jane Eyre’s despair upon learning the truth about her beloved Edward Rochester and Bertha on what should have been her wedding day. While metaphorical for Jane, it was all too literal for Charlotte in the first summer of her life.

Born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, England, Charlotte was one of the six children of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell. Patrick was an Anglican clergyman who moved his family to the remote village of Haworth upon securing its rectorship. Mrs. Brontë died shortly after, and the Brontë children were left in the care of their father and an aunt. Charlotte grew up surrounded by the gloomy Yorkshire moors, and she and her siblings amused themselves by inventing imaginative games and making up romantic stories to tell one another.

In 1824, Charlotte and her sisters—Maria, Elizabeth, and Emily—were sent to a cheap school with low fees, unpalatable food, and harsh discipline. Charlotte revisited these and other life experiences when she wrote her masterpiece Jane Eyre. She made Jane, like herself, go through the pain of early orphanhood, endure a miserably abusive school, work as a governess, and get entangled in a complicated romantic relationship.^[3]

7 Mary Shelley Writes Frankenstein

Geneva was a miserable place to be in July 1816 for 18-year-old Mary Godwin. It was supposed to be a grand summer vacation for Mary, her stepsister Claire, and Mary’s lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Except there was no summer. No hiking or boating on Lake Geneva. Instead, Mary noted, “The thunderstorms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before.” The city itself was stalked by floods and famine.

Shelley had rented a villa by the lake near the place taken by his fellow poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron. He, Mary, and Claire would endure the gloomy weather indoors with Byron and his companion, Dr. John Polidori, drinking, reading poetry and ghost stories, or else stoning themselves into delirium with laudanum (liquid opium). One night, Lord Byron suggested that each of them should write their own ghost story.

After a few nights, both poets lost interest. Polidori came up with “The Vampyre,” an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s later Dracula. Mary’s imagination, meanwhile, gave her a fearful vision: “I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion…” She later wrote, “What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

It was Mary who worked the bleakness of the season into what would be her immortal masterpiece of gothic horror—Frankenstein.^[4]

6 Estonia Ends Serfdom

In the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in the early 19th century, 95% of the population were serfs or unfree peasants. They were not much better than slaves. They were considered property by the landlord and could be sold with or without the land. But in 1816, winds of change—the positive kind—were blowing. Nations were realizing that a modern society could only function under the constitutional principle of freedom and equality in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution had already liberated its peasants, and Prussia freed its serfs in 1810.

The Estonian Peasant Ordinance of 1816 was the first of three edicts that ended serfdom in the Baltics. It allowed for fourteen years of gradual emancipation, creating a new free estate. It did not yet have a voice in government—that being the prerogative of the nobility—but it was moving in the right direction. By mid-century, more ambitious peasants could move up the social ladder, and many flocked to the Russian capital of St. Petersburg to pursue higher education. Peasant communities were set up with modern institutions of self-government.

Serfdom was abolished in Russia itself in 1861 by Tsar Alexander II, mere weeks before Abraham Lincoln, the man who would abolish slavery in the United States, took office as president.^[5]

5 First All-Black Church Established

White members of the St. George Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia did not like the increasing number of Black congregants. First, they were ejected from their seats and placed around the wall. Then, they were told to go up to the gallery. When officials pulled them off their knees while they were still praying, that was the last straw. Other African Americans in the Middle Atlantic states faced similar racial discrimination, and Richard Allen, a pastor and former Delaware slave, saw independence from white congregations as the only solution.

In 1807 and 1815, Allen successfully got Pennsylvania courts to recognize his churches as independent institutions. In April 1816, Allen was consecrated pastor of the newly formed African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first African American congregation organized in the United States. Before the Civil War, the AMEC was confined to the Northeast and Midwest, but in the closing stages of the war, it began to evangelize the newly freed slaves. It experienced a spurt of growth from the Reconstruction era onwards.

By the late 19th century, the AMEC had spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. It played a significant role in higher education for African Americans, having an affiliation with Black colleges and universities. Today, it has approximately 2.5 million members.^[6]

4 Invention of the Stethoscope

The ubiquitous device most iconic of modern medicine was born out of one French doctor’s sense of modesty. René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec had developed a diagnostic procedure where he pressed his ear directly against a patient’s chest to hear heart sounds—a technique known as immediate auscultation. It wasn’t a problem with male patients. But the women? Laennec determined he could not just place his ear between those lady parts without having an attack of conscience. It wasn’t just awkward; it was downright impermissible.

Confronted with this situation one day, Laennec remembered two children he had seen playing in the street, where one held the end of a piece of solid wood to his ear while his playmate scratched the other end with a pin. The wood amplified the sound to the other child. So Laennec rolled up a piece of paper and put the tube between his ear and the patient’s chest.

It amplified heart and lung sounds even more clearly. It also solved the problem of having to hear through the chests of obese patients. He experimented with other materials to improve the tool, settling on a hollowed-out piece of wood a foot long and an inch and a half in diameter. Laennec considered calling it, rather unimaginatively, “cylinder” but decided on “stethoscope” from the Greek stetho (chest) and scope (view).

With his new device, Laennec was the first to describe bronchiectasis and cirrhosis and also classified pulmonary conditions such as pneumonia, pleurisy, emphysema, and pneumothorax. He wrote down his observations in De l’Auscultation Médiate (On Mediate Auscultation) and coined many clinical terms still used today. The stethoscope was further refined and improved by succeeding generations of doctors to become the foremost diagnostic tool in modern healthcare.^[7]

3 Peace Society Founded

When the guns fell silent over Europe after Waterloo in 1815, more than two million Europeans lay dead from 25 years of war resulting from one man’s ambition. The devastation wrought by Napoleon’s armies compounded the effects of Tambora. Many thought the world had enough of war. Most were pacifist Quakers with religious motives, but they were also supported by radicals with liberal and humanitarian views. On June 14, 1816, two Quakers, William Allen and Joseph Tregelles Price, founded the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace, commonly known simply as the London Peace Society.

The Society also welcomed non-Quakers who believed in the Quaker ideal of “absolute pacifism,” which holds that all war—including defensive war—is immoral. But it also allowed pragmatists who considered defensive war acceptable to become co-workers. The movement was further strengthened by French ideas of international law and arbitration as alternatives to war.

The peace movement snowballed from there. The first continental European peace society was founded in Geneva in 1830. Peace congresses were held in various cities. Although the London Peace Society disbanded in the 1930s, it sparked a movement that remains alive today, led by the International Peace Bureau.^[8]

2 American Colonization Society Founded

In August 1791, the free and enslaved Black population of Haiti began a revolution that eventually succeeded in wresting control of the colony from France. The proclamation of Haitian independence and the creation of the first Black republic in the Caribbean on January 1, 1804, sent shivers down the spines of slaveholders in America.

While the U.S. Constitution protected slavery, there was already a growing number of free Blacks. Politicians and slaveholders worried that these free Blacks might encourage those enslaved to rebel in the spirit of the Haitian revolutionists. A planned insurrection had already been uncovered in 1800. To enslavers, it was a ticking time bomb.

Debates ensued on how to address the threat posed by free Black individuals. New restrictions and codes were imposed. One idea was to create a colony for freedmen west of the Mississippi or in the West Indies. In 1815, an attempt to settle 38 Black people in Sierra Leone proved successful, and all eyes turned to West Africa as the most suitable place for colonization. In 1816, a group of elite whites that included Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Francis Scott Key, formed the American Colonization Society to give the freedmen a new home in West Africa.

While the ACS had less than pure motives and had support from racists and pro-slavery groups who could not abide integrating free Blacks into society, it did remove freedmen from the discrimination, inequality, and injustice they faced in America. In Africa, they had the opportunity to build prosperous new lives and enjoy real freedom and citizenship.

In 1821, the ACS purchased land along the West African coast for the establishment of the new colony. It would be known as Liberia, and its capital, Monrovia, was named after President James Monroe.^[9]

1 Birth of Werner Siemens

The Year Without a Summer was a bad time for tenant farmers like Christian Ferdinand Siemens, who managed the Obergut farm estate in Lenthe, a village west of Hanover. It was here that his wife Eleonore gave birth to their fourth child, Ernst Werner, on December 13, 1816. The difficulties did not end with the passing of Tambora weather. By 1824, Christian was deeply in arrears on his rent, and when the lease to Obergut expired, the landlord refused to renew it.

Little Werner and his family moved to a state-owned farm near Lübeck. Although not wealthy, Werner’s parents were educated and ensured that their children would be as well. At eleven, Werner attended secondary school, riding a pony or walking the 3.7 miles (6 km) to reach it. His inclination toward engineering and science would bear fruit beginning in the 1840s when he developed a new electroplating process—the first in a long series of electrical advances that culminated in his discovery in 1866 of the dynamo-electric principle. For the first time, mechanical energy was converted into electricity without the use of permanent magnets.

Siemens revolutionized the electrical industry. Electrical current of unlimited strength could now be generated cheaply and conveniently. The company he founded, now known as Siemens AG, developed the first electric railway system and discovered numerous new applications for electricity. In 1888, Emperor Frederick III elevated him to noble status, making him Werner von Siemens.^[10]