Red Sky in Morning

And in the digital age, trends spread faster and wider. This means anyone's ideas can take hold and reshape our culture. Let's start with the current day. The fashion trend known as ballet core has become popular in recent years. In turn, ballet has been used a lot in fashion marketing, and because of the Internet, people on social media make fun. It seems like it's usually experienced ballerinas who point out

poor representations of ballet. There's a whole Instagram account dedicated to making fun of ads where the models obviously don't know what they are doing, but the power of advertising prevails because what started as a fashion trend has become a genuine interest in ballet. There's a whole world of

ballet on Instagram and TikTok. Novice dancers share videos of themselves practicing it's their ballet journey, if you will, but experienced dancers also post their own videos about how dangerous it can be to try certain moves without knowing the right technique. To some, this might seem a little snobby, like they're gatekeeping a historic art form, especially since ballet was built on taking risks. In the early nineteenth century,

ballet was entering its Romantic era. Ballets such as Giselle featured the forest dwelling spirits of women scorn, But as the art form evolved, a choreographer named Charles Louis Didelo saw his dancer's potential for conveying emotion through movement. Didelo was a professionally trained dancer, but a leg injury ended his career early, but he still taught others. It's possible that his inability to express himself through dance gave way to his ingenuity in helping others do so, because he

made some key contributions to the art form. Overall, one simple but impactful change was the way Didelo simplified costumes. He wanted to make it easier for dancers to move, so he did away with the aristocratic layers, ruffles, and petticoats and replaced them with shorter, one or two piece costumes. By then, the original ballet shoe, a slipper with a low heel, had also been revised. A French ballerina named Marie Camargo removed the heel from her shoe, and this

made it easier for her to perform leaps and complex footwork. Today, Camargo is now credited with creating the first ballet slipper and Charles Louis Didelo also made a more daring change. As dancers techniques evolved and stories became more dramatic, he wanted performers to reach new heights literally. He designed a pully mechanism with the wire which he attached to the dancers. The mechanism could lift them just enough to make it look like they were dancing on the tips of their toes.

This became known as Didelo's flying machine, and it made waves. Choreographers used the machine to distinguish mortal characters from the supernatural by eighteen twenty, ballerinas realized that they could imitate the art Didallo had introduced by dancing on their toes all on their own. But it wouldn't be easy. That was when an Italian dancer named Amalia Bruniuli don square tip slippers for extra support. While she was able to rise onto her toes, it took an obvious amount of

strain and effort, still it was unprecedented. About ten years later, Bruniulli's achievements inspired another dancer named Marie Talioni. Talioni is known to be the first ballerina to perform a full length ballet on point, and unlike those before her, Marie's shoes had leather soles and were tied with ribbons for extra stability, and this was a major milestone. Dancing on points became the norm. Later that century, Italian shoemakers began

adding stiff boxes at the toe. Point shoes have continued to evolve over the years. Some brands even offer high tech shock absorption. Today. A ballet dancers prepared to go on point from a young age, although it's not recommended they do so before around the age of eleven, when their feet are fully developed. Otherwise they risk serious injury. Adult dancers can go on point two even if they're

new to ballet. In this case, orthopedics recommend about three years of training first, and this is why today experienced dancers urge others not to dance in point shoes that they haven't been properly fitted for or without training for it. It's been two hundred years since Didelo's flying machine revolutionized ballet, and the art form is much more inclusive Nowadays. Dancers can find point shoes in different skin tones, and professional

companies hire more diverse casts every day. There's still a long way to go, but with the level of interest scene on social media, I think it's fair to say that every day people can help propel the world of ballet to new heights. It's one of the most famous paintings in the world. A bridge stretching far into the background, a squirreling sky of unsettling yellows in reds, and a figure hands to its ears features hazy, its mouth open

wide in an unending whale. When Norwegian artist Edward Munk unveiled this scream in eighteen ninety three, people thought he was losing his mind. They believed a work that captured anguish and terror like that reflected something deeply wrong inside the artist. Psyche Monk, frustrated with the public's reaction, wrote a hidden message on the piece in protest. In one corner, he wrote, the words can only have been painted by a madman. But the inspiration for Munk's masterpiece didn't come

from inside his mind. Instead, it was a true reaction to an evening stroll he took in Oslo in eighteen eighty three. Those horrible hellish skies that he painted in the scream, those were very real, the result of a natural disaster half a world away. On August twenty seventh of eighteen eighty seven, a tremendous boom came from a small, uninhabited island in Indonesia. It was and still is, the

loudest sound ever recorded. The source was Mount Krakatoa. After belching out smoke and lava for months, the volcano erupted in spectacular fashion. It killed an estimated thirty six thousand people, sent shockwaves rippling throughout the ocean, and its blast was heard as far away as Australia and Africa. When the smoke cleared, only a deep caldera remained where the island once stood. The eruption became one of the first viral news stories, spreading across the world via telegraph wires in

a matter of hours. But news wasn't the only thing that Krakatoa sent circling the globe. The destructive force of the explosion set millions of tons of sulfur dioxide and volcanic ash into the atmosphere. Clouds of both spread as far as Europe and the Americas, drastically affecting weather patterns in some places. The next summer, eighteen eighty four, was cooler than the average by two degrees celsius, and scientists have found sulfur dioxide from Krakatoa trapped in glaciers as

far away as Greenland and Antarctica. Now while the sulfur dioxide affected how people felt, the ash changed what they saw. In eighteen eighty three and in eighty four, Europeans recorded that the moon appeared blue, and the sky would sometimes look green, orange, and even pink in the middle of

the day. The red skies created by the ash were so intense that some people mistook them for fires roaring on the horizon, and so that was what happened in eighteen eighty three in Oslo, when Edvard Monk was enjoying an afternoon walk. He described what he saw and felt that day in a journal entry nearly a decade later. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. He wrote, there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue black fjord and the city. My friend walked on and I stood alone,

trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature. And of course he committed this feeling to canvas, and in eighteen ninety three unveiled The Scream, complete with hell fire skies. For many years, the real life inspiration for the screams red sky was lost to the annals of history. Many patrons just sort of assumed the bloody

clouds were representative of the screamer's turbulent inner world. But in two thousand and four, researchers at the University of Texas were able to track down scientific proof that the red skies were not just symbolism. By comparing meteorological data, news reports, and Monk's own observations, they concluded that the scream owed its desolate atmosphere to Krakatoa, out of a natural disaster, came one of the world's most famous paintings. The Scream isn't the only lasting art that owes its

creation to volcanic destruction. Even though Krakatoa's impact was huge, it wasn't the first eruption to change the world. Back in eighteen fifteen, another mountain blew its top in Indonesia. The eruption of Mount Tambora also sent ash and sulfur dioxide into the air, affecting climate patterns as far away as Europe. And thanks to Tambora, the summer of eighteen sixteen was very cold and wet, destroying crops, herding economies,

and worst of all, ruining vacations. In fact, it forced one particular group of writers and socialites to spend their trip to Lake Geneva inside looking for ways to pass the time. That was when one of the writers suggested that they could have a ghost story contest, writing gloomy tales to match the gloomy mood outside, and during their time there, the group came up with half finished sketches about vampires and ghosts and quickly moved on to other amusements.

But one of them took it much more seriously. You see, one of the women had been haunted by the group's discussion of the nature of life. Kept inside by the incessant rain, she began to write a story about a doctor's quest to restore life to a corpse. Two years later, she published the book that long volcanic summer had inspired, and she called it Frankenstein. I hope you've enjoyed today's

guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.