What Was the Worst Year to Be Alive?
What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy
The episode explores three of the most catastrophic years in human history: 1816, 1348, and 536 CE. Hosts Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy ex
Key takeaways
- The 1816 'Year Without a Summer' was triggered by the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.
- The Black Death in 1348 killed an estimated 30% to 60% of Europe's population.
Main topics
- The Year Without a Summer (1816)
- The Black Death (1348)
Notable quotes
Catastrophe makes things.
Conclusion
While historical catastrophes brought immense suffering, they often ac
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:03) I could just imagine two dinosaurs looking at each other going, you know, it just don't get no better than this. And one of those says, yeah. And then, oh Speaker 2 (0:14) no. Speaker 1 (0:17) A giant meteorite strikes the earth. Goodbye dinosaurs. Speaker 2 (0:33) Hi, and welcome to What the Fact? The show that reveals the wildest true facts ever recorded and tells you the whole story behind them. Hi, Speaker 1 (0:42) I'm Connor, and I'm here to bring the charm and humor and maybe a British accent or two to your history lesson. Speaker 2 (0:48) And I am Carter Roy. I will be your guide through history. What happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Speaker 1 (0:55) Like and subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode. So today, we have three years. three Speaker 2 (1:02) very real stories and one question. Which one was actually Speaker 1 (1:07) the worst? Carter, has anything terrible ever happened in your life and then something unexpectedly good came of it? Yeah, Speaker 2 (1:17) I think so. You know, actually the pandemic. I had to be alone at home all the time and I ended up doing a lot of art because I had to kill time. So like now I... ended up being like a visual artist, and I didn't even know I could really do that until the pandemic happened. Speaker 1 (1:32) How about you? Me? I actually started watching more shows to help pass the time. And honestly, it made me rethink the fantasy genre altogether. Like, how some things that could have happened in the Middle Ages could happen in modern day. Yeah. Just hidden, you know? Totally. So it made you rethink everything Speaker 2 (1:55) a little bit. Yeah. Very cool. Well, that is actually the theme of everything we are covering. Catastrophe makes things. So today we have three years for you. Three years from human history that you absolutely did not want to be alive for. At the very end, you and I will vote on which was actually the worst. Okay, Connor, first reaction. How bad do you think this is Speaker 1 (2:17) about to get? Oh, I think it's going to get pretty, pretty, pretty bad. It is going to get pretty bad. Speaker 1 (2:27) Do you know which year a volcano, cancelled summer, caused a global famine, and also gave us Frankenstein and the bicycle? That year was 1816, also known as the year without a summer. It's amazing. It's fascinating. Like how something terrible can lead to something good in the end. Yeah, and a year without a Speaker 2 (2:49) summer. That just seems like seasons are such a part of life we expect. It's crazy to think of just like a season not happening. Can you imagine life without a summer? I can imagine how terrible Speaker 1 (3:01) it would be, how miserable Speaker 2 (3:02) everyone would be. Oh my God, people would be not happy. Okay, so the year is 1816. Europe should be having the best year it's had in a generation. Napoleon had just been defeated at Waterloo, ending over 20 years of war. Speaker 1 (3:16) Finally! Speaker 2 (3:17) Yes! Yes! All anyone wants to do is have a normal summer. Exactly. But what happens? Speaker 2 (3:24) 1816. No summer. No summer. In New England, it snows in June? Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Crazy enough to bury new crops and kill birds right where they sit. That's so sad. Speaker 1 (3:38) So Speaker 2 (3:38) sad. Can you imagine looking out and just seeing dead frozen birds? In July, the hard frost turns the corn black. The people who lived through it called 1816, 1800, and froze to death. Guess they had some kind of sense of humor back then, Speaker 1 (3:52) and trying to make the best out of a bad thing. In Speaker 2 (3:55) Europe, grain rotted from Switzerland to Ireland, bread prices doubled, then doubled again. There were food riots across France, Belgium, Switzerland. People were eating bread cut with sawdust. Speaker 1 (4:08) Oh, that doesn't sound appetizing. I've got three things to say about that. Hard to bite, difficult to chew, and impossible to swallow. You won't see me eating bread with sautés, no. Speaker 2 (4:21) Okay. In Switzerland, families were boiling weeds and eating the family cat. Oh, Speaker 1 (4:28) that's disgusting! I understand you get resourceful in a famine, but no way would I ever eat my pet, even if I was super hungry. Yeah, Speaker 2 (4:37) that shows you just how bad it was. And this was not just a European problem. It was a planet problem. In China, the cold wrecked the rice harvest. The Yangtze Valley flooded. In Yunnan Province, famine lasted three full years. In India, the monsoon failed entirely. So many historians believe a new strain of cholera emerged from that broken weather in the Bay of Bengal, the first truly global pandemic. Tens of millions of people dead over the following century. I thought dyspepsia was bad. Every bit of it traces back to one mountain. Okay, before I tell you which one, what's your guess? Krakatoa, maybe? Speaker 1 (5:17) That's what I would have guessed. That's the only one I know. But no, it was Tambora. It erupted in Indonesia. Its ash and smoke carried miles across the world. Miles. It was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. True story. I was actually in Sicily. I saw Mount Etna from a distance. And I happened to learn from my brother that... Mount Etna was used in filming Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. That scene where Anakin and Obi-Wan were fighting on Mustafar, right where they were grappling, there was a huge blast of lava. That was Mount Etna erupting. Amazing. Did they have the real Mount Etna in the background and then they, yeah, made it Speaker 2 (6:00) look like it was erupting? Well, this was about as bad as it gets. It was April 10th, 1815. And as you said, Tambora in the island of Zimbabwe. what is now Indonesia, detonates the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history and directly killed roughly 10,000 people and eventually 80 to 90,000 more. The blast was heard 1,600 miles away, which I can't even really comprehend that. How far away do you think the loudest you could hear? Speaker 1 (6:29) Probably about, well, if the explosion was loud enough, maybe 10,000 miles or more. I mean, I thought... Pompeii's destruction by Mount Vesuvius was bad. Yeah, this is bad. Okay, so people Speaker 2 (6:42) 1,600 miles away thought it was cannon fire, like a battle just over the horizon. And eruptions are measured on the VEI scale, the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Talk about an on-the-nose name. Every step is roughly 10 times bigger than the last, so... Whoa. Yeah. That's crazy. Crazy. Okay, so Mount St. Helens in 1980, that's a VEI-5. Krakatoa, 1883, a VEI-6. Tambora was a VEI-7. So it'd be a hundred times bigger than Mount St. Helens. And like, I was alive when Mount St. Helens erupted. I was in Montana and like, it was like, you know, we had ash, Speaker 1 (7:22) it changed life. You know, this is, you're going to find this fascinating, Carter, but did you know volcanic ash is actually good for plant growth? I mean, if it mixes with soil. some pretty unique plants grow from it. I know, because I was actually in Hawaii once. I saw exotic plants. Speaker 2 (7:41) Stuff Speaker 1 (7:41) you would Speaker 2 (7:42) never see back here in the mainland. And right, all that volcanic ash makes it so fertile. And yeah, Mount St. Helens, when it, as a kid, I couldn't believe it was one of those things you're like, I didn't know this actually happened, volcanoes exploding. And I'm imagining it like, the tambora being that loud, it'd almost be like... Helm's Deep, you know, when the Uruk-hai are coming and there's that like... Speaker 1 (8:03) Oh yeah, the fight. They were putting fire pots into a drain at the base of the wall. Yes, and then it went and you're like, what? Like, nobody'd ever seen anything like this before. And that berserker took his own life just to blow the wall. And they're like, Speaker 2 (8:17) hit him, hit him. Except for the Speaker 1 (8:19) volcano. Arrow Speaker 2 (8:19) after Speaker 1 (8:19) arrow, Legolas shot and not one could Speaker 2 (8:22) bring down that Uruk. No. Well, that's basically what Krakatoa was. And then Tambora was ten times that. and 100 times Mount St. Helens, possibly the loudest sound recorded in human history. It was heard nearly 3,000 miles away. Sailors had eardrums ruptured 40 miles away. Some people link the red skies it left behind to the sky in Edvard Munch's The Scream. Speaker 2 (8:48) And now we know it might be because of volcanic skies. There was so much ash thrown in the atmosphere, it formed a thin gray veil around the entire Earth, bouncing sunlight