Today in History: 1815 Mount Tambora eruption

The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, was one of the most powerful in recorded history and is classified as a VEI -7 event.

 

No idea what a VEI-7 means but the fact of the matter is that with the eruption and the tsunamis, tens of thousands of people were killed.

 

According to History1800s.com:

 

It has been estimated that Mount Tambora stood approximately 12,000 feet tall before the 1815 eruption, before the top one-third of the mountain was completely obliterated. Adding to the disaster's massive scale, the huge amount of dust blasted into the upper atmosphere by the Tambora eruption contributed to a bizarre and highly destructive weather event the following year. And 1816 became known as The Year Without a Summer.

The Year without a Summer is, of course, the year Frankenstein was written.

200th anniversary of #Waterloo

What is Waterloo?

An ABBA song,of course.
An island in the South Shetland Islands named after the battle...or well King George Island
As well as dozens of towns and other places in the world
A British cheese...seriously.


But it all started (mostly) with the Battle of Waterloo where Napoleon was finally and irrevocably defeated.

June 18, 1815, Napoleon led his army of some 72,000 troops against the 68,000-man British army, which had taken up a position south of Brussels near the village of Waterloo. The British army, which included Belgian, Dutch and German troops, was commanded by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington...

In a critical blunder, Napoleon waited until midday to give the command to attack in order to let the waterlogged ground dry after the previous night’s rainstorm. The delay gave Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher’s remaining troops, who, by some accounts, numbered more than 30,000, time to march to Waterloo and join the battle later that day.

Odd that such a brilliant commander such as Napoleon made such a blunder, but I guess we can't be geniuses all the time.

So now, 200 years later, it's the battle that changed the world. And it did, if you follow the very complicated history that came after it. One flow chart will not be enough for that!