This summer’s weather is bad, but 1816 was dreadful.

It became known as the “year without a summer”, when rain bucketed down almost every day from May to September, rivers burst their banks and flooding was widespread. But, unlike this year, the summer of 1816 was also cold, and the combination of heavy rains and low temperatures left crops to rot and created serious shortages of food. Farm workers were left unemployed, grain prices soared and mobs went on the rampage for food.

In one riot, about 2,000 people in Dundee ransacked more than a hundred shops and a grain store.

The shocking weather plagued much of the northern hemisphere. In Europe at least 200,000 people died from famine and the foul weather was blamed for a typhus epidemic lasting from 1816 to 1819. Thousands emigrated to the US only to find conditions there were just as bad. Frosts in New England had ruined harvests and, in turn, spurred a mass migration westwards to the prairies.

The foul weather was caused by dust from the volcanic eruption of Tambora, in what is now Indonesia. The veil of dust blocked out sunlight and disturbed weather patterns.

But one good thing came out of the disaster. The lack of feed for horses led a German inventor, Karl Drais, to invent the velocipede, the forerunner of the bicycle.