For any number of people, seeing the “Northern ( or Southern) Lights” is somewhere at the top of their bucket list. The general drawback is that one usually has to get quite close to the poles to see them. One certainly doesn’t expect them in Cuba...
By 1859, the world had about 125,000 miles of telegraph lines. Most of them, of course, criss-crossed the more industrialised nations, but included the trans-Atlantic cable laid by the Great Eastern.
At the end of August in 1859, however, the telegraph started to go haywire. Despite being in Australia, Samuel McGowan, General Superintendent of Electric Telegraph, knew exactly what the problem was, as he explained to the Victorian Parliament several months later:
‘Not the least interesting cause of the several interruptions was the Aurora Australis, as noted on 29th August and 2nd September last.The effect upon the wires was in many cases singular. At times prevailing atmospheric currents would entirely dissipate the artificial current and assume complete possession of the lines, baffling all attempts at rendering the communication available. Again the atmospheric currents would suddenly, entirely disappear; the lines would work perfectly, when in a moment the electromagnets would be quite deprived of their ordinary power , the conducting medium would be polarized in several opposite directions, within as many seconds, and the whole natural condition of the instruments would be instantly reversed, and as suddenly set right. On one occasion during this interesting disturbance of the natural elements, I communicated with, and received an acknowledgement from, a station distant 32 miles, through atmospheric currents alone, there being at the time no battery on the line. I may add that I witnessed similar effects about twelve years back, on a line of electric telegraph in Upper Canada during the presence of a magnificent Aurora Borealis in mid-winter.'
The Aurora Australis is not uncommonly seen in the southern parts of Australia, but this was something else, and the phenomenon was pretty much worldwide. A couple of days later on the first of September, in suburban Surrey just south of London, Richard Carrington, an expert solar astronomer (and not, to our surprise, an underemployed clergyman), was observing the sun in his private observatory. As he had been doing for a while, he was recording sunspots. At precisely 11.18 am, however, two very bright beads of white light appeared bursting through the dark shapes of the sunspots.
At first, Carrington thought his apparatus, designed to mute the blinding light, had sprung a leak. Then, realising he had something new and startling on his hands, he rushed off for a second witness. However, though he was back inside a minute, “I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled.” Five minutes later, there it was, gone, recorded only by Carrington’s sketch.
Carrington had caught a momentary spasm of a much larger event: the ejection of material from the surface of the sun in a solar flare. The electromagnetic storm which hit the earth over those few late summer days has become known as the “Carrington event”.
Curiously, unlike so many events of the Victorian era, we don’t have a nice colour illustration or even an engraving for the Illustrated London News. Indeed, though there is evidence on scientific instruments to suggest that most of the Northern Hemisphere was bathed in the Aurora Borealis, a combination of heavy cloud and it being the wrong time of day means the displays were only seen at their mist spectacular in the Americas. As a Baltimore newspaper reported on September 3rd,
“Those who happened to be out late on Thursday night had an opportunity of witnessing another magnificent display of the auroral lights. The phenomenon was very similar to the display on Sunday night, though at times the light was, if possible, more brilliant, and the prismatic hues more varied and gorgeous. The light appeared to cover the whole firmament, apparently like a luminous cloud, through which the stars of the larger magnitude indistinctly shone. The light was greater than that of the moon at its full, but had an indescribable softness and delicacy that seemed to envelop everything upon which it rested. Between 12 and 1 o'clock, when the display was at its full brilliancy, the quiet streets of the city resting under this strange light, presented a beautiful as well as singular appearance.” In Mexico, despite the distraction of a civil war, the Aurora was noted and reported.
Carrington’s brief solar flare was responsible: it had taken seventeen hours to reach the atmosphere. He was the first to publish the scientific connection between the two, and today his name gets constantly bandied about as scientists discuss the likely effect of a repeat performance on a world with slightly more than 125,000 miles of electromagnetic infrastructure. Poor Richard Hodgson, an amateur astronomer who simultaneously observed the solar flare, rarely gets a mention outside the world of astronomy.