Laughing gas, nitrous oxide, was a Georgian craze long before it became a modern party drug. The chemist Humphry Davy tested it in Bristol in the late 1790s, inhaling it himself and publishing his findings in 1800. He noticed that it produced euphoria and eased pain. Poets and friends such as Coleridge and Southey tried it, and demonstrations soon moved from laboratories to fashionable salons and the popular stage. Showmen charged audiences to watch volunteers act wildly under its effects. Dentists later turned the same gas into one of the first anaesthetics in the 1840s.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.