Just after 12.30pm on 8\u00a0February 1750, Britain\u2019s lord chancellor was sitting in Westminster Hall with the Courts of King\u2019s Bench and Chancery when the room began to shake. For a moment everyone thought the great edifice was going to collapse on their heads.<\/p>\n

In Lincoln\u2019s Inn Fields, meanwhile, Newcastle House trembled so much that the Duke of Newcastle sent out his servant to enquire what had happened from a neighbour, the physicist Gowin Knight. The servant found Knight busy investigating the signs of disturbance in his own residence, including a bed that had moved.<\/p>\n

In Gray\u2019s Inn, a lamp-lighter very nearly fell from his ladder. At Leicester House, home of the Prince of Wales, the foundations were believed to be sinking. Throughout the City and Westminster, people felt their desks lurch, chairs shook, doors slammed, windows rattled and crockery clattered on its shelves. In Leadenhall Street, part of a chimney fell. In Southwark, south of the Thames, a slaughterhouse with a hay-loft collapsed.<\/p>\n

Little did they know it, but Londoners were being shaken and stirred by the first of several earthquakes that would strike England that year. Although small \u2013 with an estimated magnitude of just 2.6, according to today\u2019s British Geological Survey \u2013 the epicentre of the 8 February quake was shallow and centred beneath the capital, apparently around London Bridge. So the city received a considerable jolt.<\/p>\n

Puzzled MPs were halted in their tracks, jolted against walls or felt papers and briefcases jerked from their hands. They suspected a Guy Fawkes-style explosion <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
A third quake, with its epicentre at nearby Colchester, rattled the Houses of Parliament<\/a> in 1884. Puzzled MPs were halted in their tracks, jolted against walls or felt papers and briefcases jerked from their hands. They suspected a Guy Fawkes<\/a>-style explosion, perhaps set off by the notorious Dynamiters then being prosecuted for their Irish nationalist activities.<\/p>\n
But it was 1750, the so-called \u2018Year of Earthquakes\u2019 that triggered a country-wide obsession with seismic events and kick-started the scientific study of the subject. So, strange as it is to report, seismology began not in seismic California or Japan but in stable Britain.<\/p>\n
At first, an earthquake was not accepted as an explanation for the 8 February tremor \u2013 so improbable did it appear to be. London\u2019s 1692 shock was too distant to be remembered. Instead, there were theories about cannon-fire and exploding powder magazines. Then it was said that Isaac Newton<\/a>, before his death in 1727, had predicted the jolt by calculating that Jupiter would approach close to Earth in 1750.<\/p>\n
Within two or three weeks, Londoners began to forget the strange experience.<\/p>\n
Almost exactly four weeks after the first shock, at 5:30am on 8 March, came the second. It was more pronounced, and covered five times the area \u2013 a circle with a diameter of 40\u00a0miles ,with its centre roughly three miles north of London Bridge. Two houses in Whitechapel collapsed, and several chimneys fell in various parts of London, as did stones from the new towers of Westminster Abbey<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Violent vibration<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Horace Walpole, man of letters and politician, was in bed in central London. Three days later, he reported to a friend: \u201cOn a sudden I felt my bolster lift up my head; I thought somebody was getting from under my bed, but soon found it was a strong earthquake, that lasted near half a minute, with a violent vibration and great roaring. I rang my bell; my servant came in, frightened out of his senses: in an instant we heard all the windows in the neighbourhood flung up. I got up and found people running into the streets, but saw no mischief done: there has been some; two old houses flung down, several chimneys, and much china-ware.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president of the Royal Society, antiquarian Martin Folkes, was also in bed. Reporting to the society that very day, he noted that the vibration and noise could not have been that of a passing cart or coach \u2013 to which many compared it \u2013 because everything was quiet at such an early hour. He remarked that the shock had been felt on the outskirts of London: \u201cI sent a servant out about 7 o\u2019clock, and he met a countryman, who was bringing a load of hay from beyond Highgate, and who was on the other side of the town when the shock happened; he did not, he said, feel it, as he was driving his waggon; but that the people he saw in the town of Highgate were all greatly surprised, saying they had had their houses very much shocked, and that the chairs in some were thrown about in their rooms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Near Holland House, in west London, the bailiff of Henry Fox, while counting his sheep, observed the dry, solid ground move like a quagmire or quicksand, causing much alarm among the animals and some crows nesting in nearby trees. In A\u00a0History of British Earthquakes, Charles Davison notes that \u201ccats started up, dogs howled, sheep ran about, a horse refused to drink, the water being so much agitated, in several ponds fish leaped out of the water and were seen to dart away in all directions\u201d.<\/p>\n
A slight tremor occurred on 9\u00a0March, and then came a powerful rumour: a third shock, exactly a month after the second one, would swallow up London. The rumour was started by an army trooper who would eventually be despatched to Bedlam, London\u2019s lunatic asylum. By 4 April, doomsday had somehow advanced to the very next day, and panic took hold. \u201cThis frantic terror prevails so much, that within these three days 730 coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park corner, with whole parties removing into the country,\u201d reported a sceptical Walpole. \u201cSeveral women have made earthquake gowns; that is, warm gowns to sit out of doors all tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Superstitious fears<\/strong><\/h3>\n
That Walpole was not exaggerating is confirmed by the \u2018Historical Chronicle\u2019 of April published in the monthly Gentleman\u2019s Magazine. For 4 April, this reads: \u201cIncredible numbers of people, being under strong apprehensions that London and Westminster would be visited with another and more fatal earthquake\u2026 left their houses, and walked in the fields, or lay in boats all night; many people of fashion in the neighbouring villages sat in their coaches till daybreak; others went to a greater distance, so that the roads were never more thronged, and lodgings were hardly to be procured at Windsor; so far, and even to their wits\u2019 end, had their superstitious fears, or their guilty conscience, driven them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of the blame must undoubtedly fall on the activities of religious preachers during March. Charles Wesley, a founder of the growing Methodist movement, bluntly sermonised: \u201cGod is himself the Author, and sin is the moral cause.\u201d<\/p>\n
A leading clergyman, William Whiston, successor to Newton as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, expressed his belief that the end of the world was close at hand, as predicted by 99\u00a0signals. No 92 was that there would occur a terrible \u2013 but, to good men, a joyful \u2013 earthquake, which would destroy one tenth of an eminent city. Given his standing in London society, Whiston\u2019s ideas were seriously discussed.<\/p>\n
But it was the warnings of the bishop of London, Thomas Sherlock, that attracted the most attention. Sherlock\u2019s A\u00a0Letter to the Clergy and Inhabitants of London and Westminster\u2026 on Occasion of the Late Earthquakes apparently sold 10,000 copies in two days, was reprinted several times, and is said to have sold more than 100,000 copies in less than six months. Sherlock urged his readers to repent, and to ignore \u201clittle philosophers, who see a little, and but very little into natural causes\u2026 not considering that God who made all things, never put anything out of his own power\u201d.<\/p>\n
When London failed to fall, there was a general air of sheepishness in society. Many people simply blanked the earthquakes from their memory, and no attempt was made to protect London\u2019s buildings from future shocks.<\/p>\n
Natural philosophers, however, remained fascinated. At this time, despite Newton\u2019s achievements in understanding the solar system, the science of the Earth had advanced no further than the musings of the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle, who postulated a \u2018central fire\u2019 inside underground caverns, which then collapsed, generating earthquakes. By the year\u2019s end, almost 50 articles and letters on the subject had been read before the Royal Society, which were promptly published as an appendix to its Philosophical Transactions.<\/p>\n
One of the society\u2019s fellows was John Michell, a Cambridge astronomer who had a remarkable range of interests, including geology. During the 1750s, Michell examined eyewitness reports from England in 1750 and from the devastating Lisbon earthquake in 1755, and analysed them according to Newtonian mechanics. His important if flawed paper, \u2018Conjectures Concerning the Cause and Observations upon the Phaenomena of Earthquakes\u2019, published in the Philosophical Transactions<\/em> for 1760, correctly concluded that earthquakes were \u201cwaves set up by shifting masses of rock miles below the surface\u201d \u2013 although his explanation for this shifting relied wrongly on explosions of steam, as underground water encountered underground fires.<\/p>\n
There were two types of earthquake wave, he said: a \u201ctremulous\u201d vibration within the Earth, followed by an undulation of the Earth\u2019s surface \u2013 once again coming close to the truth. Despite being a clergyman, Michell boldly left the divine out of his analysis: the first thinker about earthquakes to do so since the ancient Greeks. Thus, the English \u2018Year of Earthquakes\u2019 led to the first recognisably scientific steps in understanding this influential, but still embarrassingly unpredictable, phenomenon.<\/p>\n

3 more earthquakes that shaped history<\/h4>\n
Lisbon, 1755<\/h6>\n
A seismic event that dealt Portugal\u2019s empire a grievous blow<\/em><\/p>\n
The sudden destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake and tsunami in 1755 exerted an influence on 18th-century Europe as far-reaching as the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in the 20th century. This is epitomised by Voltaire\u2019s 1759 novel, Candide, satirising religious explanations of the disaster and the philosophy of optimism.<\/p>\n
By the 19th century, images of a shaking Lisbon were icons of natural disaster comparable with the smothering of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius. In Portugal, the devastation accelerated the long-term decline of the country in Europe and the colonial world, which had been caused by its over-reliance on gold revenues from its colony Brazil and what many saw as the pernicious influence of Jesuit orthodoxy. Although Lisbon was gradually, and impressively, rebuilt under the near-dictatorship of the marquess of Pombal, the country continued to weaken economically, especially after Brazil gained its independence in 1822.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Caracas, 1812<\/h6>\n
Did Venezuela\u2019s agony lead to a political revolution?<\/em><\/p>\n
An earthquake in Venezuela in 1812 destroyed much of the country\u2019s buildings including those of its capital, Caracas. The damage happened to be worst in the areas controlled by Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar\u2019s recently proclaimed First Republic of Venezuela and relatively light in areas sympathetic to the colonial ruler, Spain \u2013 a fact immediately exploited by the local Catholic authorities, who supported Spain.<\/p>\n
By Bol\u00edvar\u2019s own admission, the earthquake directly precipitated the republic\u2019s collapse four months later under attack by Spanish forces. Captured by the Spanish, Bol\u00edvar was sent into exile, and settled in Cartagena. There he unexpectedly became the leader of a much wider independence movement than the one he had led in Venezuela.<\/p>\n
So, indirectly, the 1812 Caracas earthquake may have led to the birth of new South American nations \u2013 through Bol\u00edvar\u2019s liberation of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru from Spanish rule in the 1820s.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/h4>\nSan Francisco, 1906<\/h6>\n
An economic powerhouse rose from the rubble of this natural disaster<\/em><\/p>\n
The fire that destroyed three-quarters of San Francisco over three days in 1906 was started by an earthquake that disabled the water supply of the city, including its fire hydrants. San Francisco recovered remarkably quickly, largely because the city authorities, local businesses and even the insurance industry treated the disaster as incendiary rather than seismic, so that residents were permitted to claim on their fire insurance and investors were not discouraged from financing reconstruction through fear of future earthquakes.<\/p>\n
And no attempt was made to introduce anti-seismic emergency and building regulations.<\/p>\n
Within a decade, San Francisco was rebuilt and its economy was expanding. In the 1950s, it spawned the nearby industrial area, today known as Silicon Valley, also located on the San Andreas fault. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake became history\u2019s leading example of how a great earthquake can trigger the \u2018creative destruction\u2019 of a city.<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>
Andrew Robinson is the author of Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization<\/em>, published by Thames & Hudson<\/strong><\/p>\n
This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Emma Mason Published: Wednesday, 03 November 2021 at 12:00 am Just after 12.30pm on 8\u00a0February 1750, Britain\u2019s lord chancellor was sitting in Westminster Hall with the Courts of King\u2019s Bench and Chancery when the room began to shake. For a moment everyone thought the great edifice was going to collapse on their heads. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":6540,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"10"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2021\/11\/the-earthquakes-that-rocked-georgian-london-3-more-seismic-events-that-shaped-history.jpg",720,479,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2021\/11\/the-earthquakes-that-rocked-georgian-london-3-more-seismic-events-that-shaped-history-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2021\/11\/the-earthquakes-that-rocked-georgian-london-3-more-seismic-events-that-shaped-history-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2021\/11\/the-earthquakes-that-rocked-georgian-london-3-more-seismic-events-that-shaped-history.jpg",720,479,false],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2021\/11\/the-earthquakes-that-rocked-georgian-london-3-more-seismic-events-that-shaped-history.jpg",720,479,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2021\/11\/the-earthquakes-that-rocked-georgian-london-3-more-seismic-events-that-shaped-history.jpg",720,479,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2021\/11\/the-earthquakes-that-rocked-georgian-london-3-more-seismic-events-that-shaped-history.jpg",720,479,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Emma Mason Published: Wednesday, 03 November 2021 at 12:00 am Just after 12.30pm on 8\u00a0February 1750, Britain\u2019s lord chancellor was sitting in Westminster Hall with the Courts of King\u2019s Bench and Chancery when the room began to shake. For a moment everyone thought the great edifice was going to collapse on their heads. In…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/6539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}