Maria Popova

See how systemic that is?

Like it impacted everything.

The organizing principle of human life has always been being able to move around.

And suddenly people had no horses.

So he decided to create a mechanical horse, essentially.

And he invented the bicycle.

The bicycle was born out of the eruption of Mount Tambora.

Now, meanwhile, in June, near Lake Geneva, five disaffected youths had gone on vacation for the beautiful Swiss spring and found themselves trapped at the Villa Diodati with endless rains.

And just to amuse themselves, decided to do a kind of prompt and write ghost stories.

Who are drinking laudanum and other opioids to pass the time.

Lord Byron was one of them.

Percy Shelley was one of them.

And Mary, Mary Shelley, you were one of them.

And you wrote Frankenstein on that stormy, boring night out of volcanic captivity.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because one thing it did do is it legitimized meteorology, which was a very young science that was relegated to, like, pseudoscience, meaning physicists who decided to study the atmosphere were like, oh, you know, he's gone off the deep end, you know, he's never going to have a career.

But the stratosphere had just been discovered.

I mean, the idea that the sky is like the ocean and has these different layers was brand new and it was kind of contested.

And nobody really dared study that as a serious scientific endeavor.

And all of a sudden something happens that is like, wait, there's something to this.

Air currents and turbulences and layers change.