Carrington Event

The Carrington Event was a massive geomagnetic storm that happened in 1859. It led to expanded understanding of solar phenomena.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:00Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:14Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  A few weeks ago, I was thinking about our Oktoberfest trip that is coming up later this year, and I suddenly wondered whether we might have a chance of seeing the aurora while we're there, partly because one of the places we'll be staying seems like it will have maybe not as much light pollution as where I live, and also partly because I have a really hard time visualizing how far north things are on other continents, unless I'm actually looking at a globe.

• 2:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  The answer is that the aurora chances are roughly comparable to being at home in Massachusetts, which means unlikely but not impossible. The only time I have seen the aurora, I was in my own yard at home. So that's in spite of having tried to see them in Iceland while we were there. That didn't work out. During my quest to get an answer to that question, though, I stumbled across a reference to the Carrington event. And then a couple of weeks later, the Carrington event came up again in a video game that I was playing, and I thought, should that be an episode? The Carrington event was a massive geomagnetic storm that happened in 1859. And in some

• 3:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  ways, it strikes me as a story of serendipity.

• 3:36Holly Frey?

  Most people who experienced the Carrington event saw an aurora, including lots of people who lived in places where auroras do not normally appear. Although the words aurora borealis and aurora australis were not coined until the early 18th century, there are written descriptions of phenomena that certainly sound like auroras going back to the ancient world. The oldest might be an account of a five-colored light in the sky, which was recorded in China about 3,000 years ago. Assyrian astrological records dating back to the 7th century BCE describe a red glow at night. Aristotle's Meteorologica, which was written

• 4:17Holly Frey?

  around 330 BCE, describes the nighttime appearance of chasms and trenches in blood red, which sometimes look like flames or moving torches.

• 4:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  All of those sound like they could definitely be describing an aurora or something else, but possibly.

• 4:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Today, we know that auroras are caused by interactions between charged particles from the sun and atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Auroras are most common near the poles because the Earth's magnetic field deflects those charged particles, and that field is weakest around the poles. But during this event, people saw auroras much closer to the equator than it usually appears, including people who were living in the tropics.

• 5:06Holly Frey?

  Astronomers and other people who were observing the sun also noticed sunspots leading up to this event. Like descriptions of auroras, descriptions of sunspots go back to the ancient world. People in China and Korea are known to have observed sunspots as long ago as 800 BCE. But the oldest known depiction of spots on the face of the sun, meaning a sketch, not just a written description, is in The Chronicle of John of Worcester, which is an English text dating back to 1128. There is also a Chinese account of a black spot on the sun from a few months later. It may be describing the same spot, although it doesn't have an illustration to accompany it.

• 5:51Holly Frey?

  The first people known to observe and record sunspots through a telescope were past podcast subject Thomas Harriet and Galileo Galilei in the early 17th century. I just went to Galileo's tomb.

• 6:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh. By the 19th century, people were making systematic, methodical observations of sunspot activity. One was Samuel Heinrich Schwab, who was a pharmacist from Germany, who started recording daily sunspot observations in 1826. In 1829, he sold his pharmacy so he could work on astronomy full-time, and by 1844, he had concluded that sunspots occur in 10-year cycles. That number was later adjusted to 11 years, but it's sometimes still referred to as the Schwab cycle. One of the people who was inspired by Schwab's work was Richard C. Carrington, who the Carrington

• 6:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  event is named for.

• 6:52Holly Frey?

  In addition to observing the aurora and sunspots, 19th century astronomers were observing the Earth's magnetic field. The ability to do this started with the discovery of the magnetic compass. In its simplest version, a magnetized needle that orients itself in response to magnetic fields. The first magnetic compasses date back to about 2,000 years ago in China, and they were used for divination. It wasn't until around the 11th century that people started using them for navigation, with magnetized devices that always oriented themselves along a magnetic north-south line.

• 7:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  By the 17th century, people were theorizing that the reason compasses could do this was because the Earth had a magnetic field that magnetized needles were responding to. And by the 18th century, people had noticed that this field seemed to fluctuate sometimes. The compass needle would shift a tiny bit from where it normally pointed, and then it would stay that way for a while before shifting back. Or, on ships traveling at sea, the compass needle didn't always seem to point in exactly the same direction. But people did not yet know why this was.

• 8:05Holly Frey?

  In the early 19th century, multiple people, including William Scoresby and Carl Friedrich Gauss, developed magnetometers to measure magnetic fields, and astronomers started using these instruments to record data about the Earth's magnetic field. In 1836, Baron Alexander von Humboldt wrote a letter to the president of the Royal Society that called for the creation of a network of magnetic observatories all over the world. Humboldt was a foreign member of the society, and he had already worked to get such observatories established in Russia, China, and multiple nations across continental Europe.

• 8:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  In response to Humboldt's recommendation and the advocacy of people like astronomer John Herschel and natural philosopher William Hewell, Britain set up observatories in its territory, including in Toronto, Canada, Hobart, Australia, and on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. A lot of these observatories were also on their island territories, including St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, two different islands in New Zealand, and the Falkland Islands off the coast of South America, as well as the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean below the Antarctic Circle.

• 9:18Holly Frey?

  Britain's efforts in establishing these observatories came to be known as the magnetic scheme, or sometimes the magnetic crusade. And this crusade combined Victorian era scientific curiosity with the practical needs of the British Navy. Magnetic compass readings were imprecise. Compasses point to magnetic north, not true north, and magnetic north changes over time. There are also variations in the Earth's magnetic field that affect these compass readings. The increased use of iron in shipbuilding exacerbated these issues, and the British Navy wanted to get more information about the Earth's magnetic

• 9:58Holly Frey?

  field to try to solve these problems. By 1852, thanks to ongoing observations of sunspot activity and readings from all of these magnetometer stations, astronomers had also started to make connections between sunspot activity and activity in the Earth's magnetic field, with disruptions in the field seeming to follow sunspot activity.

• 10:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  In addition to all of this, in the mid-19th century, there were a lot of people who were interested in astronomy and had set up their own observatories. One was Richard C. Carrington, whose private observatory was in Red Hill, Surrey, south of London. Carrington was elected to the Royal Society in 1850 and the Royal Astronomical Society in 1851. Another was Richard Hodgson, whose observatory was at his home, Claybury Hall, near Woodford, Essex, northeast of London. Hodgson had become a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1848.

• 10:57Holly Frey?

  And one more 19th century development that was connected to all of this was the telegraph. The first practical telegraphs were developed in the 1830s. That is also when Samuel Morse developed his system of dots and dashes that is known as Morse code. By the 1840s, cities were being connected with telegraph wires. In 1859, there wasn't yet a transcontinental telegraph line in North America, and there wasn't a transatlantic cable. One had been laid in 1858 that had quickly stopped working, and it wasn't replaced until 1866. We did an episode on this in 2016.

• 11:37Holly Frey?

  But especially in North America and Europe, a lot of cities and towns were connected to one another by telegraph. This solar storm had an effect on telegraph lines and machinery, and we're going to get to all of that in a bit. But it also let people communicate about what they were seeing, experiencing, and measuring much faster than before the telegraph was developed.

• 12:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  It is very likely that the Carrington Event was not the largest geomagnetic storm ever to hit the Earth. For example, in 1770, people in China, Korea, and Japan reported a bright red aurora, which lasted for more than a week and was concurrent with sunspots that were about twice the size of the ones that were observed around the Carrington Event.

• 12:23Holly Frey?

  Also in 2012, Japanese physicist Fusa Miyaki, who was a PhD student at the time, discovered large spikes in carbon 14 in tree rings. In this case, rings dating back to the year 774. Other research has found examples of other huge carbon 14 spikes in tree rings from other years. We really don't know much about what caused these spikes, although they are believed to have been caused by solar energetic particle events that were probably much bigger than the Carrington Event. We also don't really know what people on Earth may have experienced while these Miyaki events were happening. There are some very brief mentions of phenomenon that may have

• 13:07Holly Frey?

  been auroras in some of the same years, but they aren't a whole lot to go on and there wasn't a way to measure whatever it was that was happening.

• 13:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that's what I find to be so serendipitous about the Carrington event, which is not something I would normally say about something that had so much to do with Britain's colonial empire project. Over just a couple of decades, magnetic observatories had been set up all over the world, including equipment on ships at sea. People had started watching the sun and recording what they saw every day for long enough to notice recurring patterns. People had figured out how to use electricity to quickly send messages across long distances. So when a geomagnetic storm started in August of 1859, things were already in place and recently in place for people to not only see its effects, but also measure those effects

• 14:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  and record them, and to very quickly realize that it was happening in other places, too.

• 14:05Holly Frey?

  And we're going to talk more about all of this after we pause for a sponsor break.

• 14:13Speaker 01

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• 14:39Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:07Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:20Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:31Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:11Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Carrington Event is sometimes described as two solar events that happened very close together, one on August 28th and 29th, 1859, and the other on September 1st and 2nd. It's also described as one event that stretched over that whole window, but with reduced activity around August 30th and 31st. People had also noticed changes in the sun in the days before any effects were noticed on Earth with a particularly large group of sunspots noted on August 26th.

• 17:50Holly Frey?

  During the first phase of this geomagnetic storm, skies were clear over much of the northern hemisphere. August 28th was the new moon, so the skies were also particularly dark. Basically, these were great conditions for seeing an aurora.

• 18:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  As we said at the top of the show, most people who experienced the Carrington Event, or knew that they were experiencing something during the event, did so by seeing an aurora. And the descriptions of what people saw sound incredible. The Boston Transcript ran this description on September 5th, quote, "On Sunday evening in Vermont, the 28th, at seven and a half o'clock, we were notified of a large fire behind the mountain to the north, and we went out to see it. And presently, the red clouds began to disappear, and spires of green shot up from the same place. It was the most magnificent display ever witnessed in this section. The sky for about an hour more kept changing from green to red till 10 and a half o'clock,

• 18:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  when all the brilliancy was gone, except a little green at the north."

• 18:56Holly Frey?

  Here's how it was described in the Washington Daily National Intelligencer of Washington DC on August 31st, quote, "The light appeared in streams, sometimes of a pure milky whiteness, and sometimes of a light crimson. The white and rose-red waves of light as they swept to and from the corona were beautiful beyond description. And a friend nearby us, while looking to the zenith with the whole heavens and earth lighted up at a greater brilliancy than is afforded by the full moon, said that it was like resting beneath the wings of the Almighty." The crown above indeed seemed like a throne of silver, purple, and crimson, hung and spread out with curtains or wings of dazzling beauty.

• 19:40Holly Frey?

  The tremulous motion of moving light, which the inhabitants of the Shetland Islands call the merry dancers, was less apparent than usual, but in place of it came those full, bright, changing but more steady streams of light, which gave an intense brilliancy to the whole heavens.

• 19:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Because of time zones and the international date line, it was August 29th when the unusual aurora started in Australia. The Hobart Town Mercury reported, quote, "It was beyond all conception, the most magnificent aurora ever seen in the colony." Some of the descriptions of the aurora as seen in South Australia describe a meteor streaking across the sky just before the aurora started. I'm not totally sure whether this was actually a meteor that was visible from South Australia, or if that's more what people thought they were seeing before the rest of the color really started.

• 20:36Holly Frey?

  People around the world were also talking about how bright it was. Professor Daniel Kirkwood of Bloomington, Indiana said, quote, "It was the lightest moonless night our citizens have ever known." Other descriptions call the sky brighter than during the full moon, or bright enough to read by. As The Times of London reported, quote, "During the first display, the whole of the northern hemisphere was as light as though the sun had set an hour before, and luminous waves rolled up in quick succession as far as the zenith, some a brilliancy sufficient to cast a perceptible shadow on the ground."

• 21:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Accounts of the aurora's return on September 1st are similarly dramatic. The Providence, Rhode Island Daily Post published this description on September 3rd, quote, "The auroral light sometimes is composed of threads, like the silken warp of a web. These sometimes become broken and fall to the earth."

• 21:36Holly Frey?

  The September 5th edition of the San Francisco Herald read, quote, "The appearance now is positively awful. The red glare is over houses, streets, and fields, and the most dreadful of conflagrations could not cast a deeper hue abroad." So that makes it sound terrifying, but the words awful and dreadful were both used pretty commonly at this time to mean inspiring awe. Elsewhere on the same day, the Herald also said, quote, "The whole sky appeared to undulate something like a field of grain in a high wind. The waters of the bay reflected the brilliant hues of the aurora. Nothing could exceed the grandeur and beauty of the sight. The effect was almost bewildering,

• 22:19Holly Frey?

  and was witnessed with mingled feelings of awe and delight by thousands."

• 22:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  On September 1st and 2nd, the aurora was also apparently bright enough to confuse birds and people sleeping outdoors. The New Orleans Daily Picayune carried an account of somebody who shot three larks at 1 a.m. and the larks were apparently out flying because they thought it was morning. And the Rocky Mountain News printed this account on September 17th, quote, "We were high up on the Rocky Mountains, sleeping in the open air. A little after midnight, we were awakened by the auroral light, so bright that one could easily read common print. Some of the party insisted that it was daylight and began the preparation of breakfast. The light continued until morning, varying in

• 23:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  intensity in different parts of the heavens and slowly changing position. We can best describe it as the sky being overcast with very light cirrus clouds, wafted before a gentle breeze, and lighted up by an immense conflagration. It had rained for 50 hours before, only ceasing about 12 hours before the auroral light."

• 23:30Holly Frey?

  In terms of where people saw this aurora, on August 28th and 29th, in the northern hemisphere, it was reported all across North America and Central America, from ships and islands in the Atlantic Ocean and through Western Europe as far south as southern Spain. The southernmost reported sightings were in Hawaii, Cuba, and Panama, and on a ship at sea that was at 25 degrees latitude north. That is the same latitude as Key Largo, Florida. Then, in the southern hemisphere, it was reported across southeastern Australia and Tasmania. The geomagnetic storm was stronger on September 1st and 2nd, with more reports in the same regions where it had been on the 29th and 30th,

• 24:14Holly Frey?

  along with new reports in Japan, China, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Chile.

• 24:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  These two waves of geomagnetic activity wreaked havoc on all those newly established telegraph systems. There were about 200,000 kilometers, or 125,000 miles of telegraph lines in the world at this point, and the storm had an impact on the vast majority of those lines, in some cases rendering them unusable for about eight hours. Accounts of what happened at the telegraph stations were as dramatic as the accounts of the aurora. Telegraph manager E.W. Culgin of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said that, quote, "streams of fire" came from the station's circuits on August 28th. Telegraph wires in France were reported as sparking.

• 25:06Holly Frey?

  Frederick W. Royce of Washington, DC, described having great difficulty because of the changing currents that seemed to be running along the lines. When it seemed like there was a storm on the line to Richmond, he switched to another wire, but then that wire developed the same problem. It was also erratic. Things would be fine for five or 10 minutes, but then the charge would become so weak that Royce couldn't feel it, or so strong that he couldn't lift the device's electromagnet. And then, as quoted in the New York Times, quote, "During the display, I was calling Richmond and had one hand on the iron plate. Happening to lean towards the sounder, which is against the wall, my forehead grazed a

• 25:49Holly Frey?

  ground wire which runs down the wall near the sounder. Immediately, I received a very severe electric shock, which stunned me for an instant. An old man who was sitting facing me but a few feet distant said that he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead to the sounder. The Morse line experienced the same difficulty in working."

• 26:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  In Sydney, Australia, the telegraphs were, quote, "seized with an unaccountable fit of restiveness. They did not altogether refuse to work, but acted irregularly. The adjustment of the instruments altering so frequently that it was almost impossible to get any continuous message through. Everywhere, the instruments were jammed. This started during the daytime, and telegraph operators did not know what in the world could be causing all of these problems until night fell and the aurora was visible in the sky."

• 26:45Holly Frey?

  Multiple telegraph workers also reported being able to send messages without the batteries attached to the lines. Samuel McGowan, the general superintendent of electric telegraph, submitted a report to Parliament that described this happening in Australia. Quote, "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.

• 27:27Holly Frey?

  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 12 years back on a line of electric telegraph in upper Canada during the presence of a magnificent aurora borealis in midwinter.

• 28:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  The same thing happened in Washington DC and in Boston. An account from Boston was published in the American Journal of Science after being reported in the Boston Traveler, and it relayed the experience of operators in Boston and in Portland, Maine. The Boston operator had removed the batteries from the line and was working without them. He sent a message to Portland and said they should remove that battery from the line as well. The operator in Portland did, and then they relayed messages without any batteries more easily than they had done with the batteries on. The Boston operator described them as, quote, "working with the auroral current," and said

• 28:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  the auroras seemed to alternately neutralize and augment their batteries, making the current sometimes too strong and sometimes too weak.

• 29:00Holly Frey?

  So if you're wondering, like, hey, what does all of this have to do with that Carrington guy that you talked about earlier? Listen, be patient, we're gonna get to it. We will get to it right after we hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.

• 29:15Speaker 01

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• 31:00Holly Frey?

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• 31:44Holly Frey?

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• 31:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  The reason this geomagnetic event is called the Carrington Event is because on September 1, 1859, English astronomer Richard C. Carrington was working in his private observatory in Red Hill, Surrey, and he witnessed something unusual. He published an account of what he saw in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in November of 1859, and it read, quote, "While engaged in the forenoon of Thursday, September 1, in taking my customary observation of the forms and positions of the solar spots, an appearance was witnessed, which I believe to be exceedingly rare. The image of the sun's

• 32:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  disk was, as usual with me, projected onto a plate of glass coated with distemper of a pale straw color, and at a distance and under a power which presented a picture of about 11 inches diameter. I had secured diagrams of all the groups and detached spots, and was engaged at the time in counting from a chronometer and recording the contacts of the spots with the crosswires used in the observation, when within the area of the Great North Group, the size of which had previously excited general remark, two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out."

• 33:18Holly Frey?

  This bright white light is probably the earliest known direct observation of a solar flare, happening in conjunction with a coronal mass ejection. In his publication, Carrington included an illustration of the sunspots, and he marked the points where he saw the bright light as A and B.

• 33:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  At first, he thought a hole had formed in the screen that was part of his instrument, because it was as bright as direct, unfiltered light would have been. So he adjusted his instruments, he made note of what time it was, and he called for somebody else to come and look with him. But in the minute or so that it took him to do all that, the light was, quote, "already much changed and enfeebled." In his illustration, he also marked where he saw the last traces of this phenomenon as points C and D.

• 34:10Holly Frey?

  Carrington exhibited a diagram of the sun and what he had seen on it at the November meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. And his account in the society's monthly notices is followed by a parenthetical note about how roughly 17 hours after Carrington made this observation, quote, "There commenced a great magnetic storm," the effects of which included the auroras and disruptions to the telegraph system. The person who wrote this parenthetical note charmingly relates what Carrington had to say about the proximity of the light he saw and this geomagnetic storm. Quote, "While the contemporary occurrence may deserve noting, he would not have it supposed that he even leans toward hastily connecting them.

• 34:54Holly Frey?

  One swallow does not make a summer."

• 34:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  I saw a lot of puns about swallows as more data was gathered about these phenomena. A better name for this event might be the Carrington-Hodgson event because Richard Hodgson made the same observation at the same time in his own observatory in Essex and also published his account of it in the November 1859 monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. His account was a little bit shorter. Hodgson wrote, quote, "While observing a group of sunspots on the first September, I was suddenly surprised at the appearance of a very bright star of light, much brighter than the sun's surface, most dazzling to the protected eye, illuminating the upper

• 35:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  edges of the adjacent spots and streaks, not unlike, in effect, the edging of the clouds at sunset. The rays extended in all directions and the center might be compared to the dazzling brilliancy of the bright star Alpha Lirae when seen through a large telescope with low power. It lasted for some five minutes and disappeared instantaneously at about 11:25 a.m." Hodgson also made a sketch of what he had seen, although that sketch does not seem to have survived until today.

• 36:12Holly Frey?

  Carrington heard about Hodgson's observations and he intentionally did not discuss it with him. In his words, "I have carefully avoided exchanging any information with that gentleman that any value which the accounts may possess may be increased by their entire independence." Both men also knew that the magnetic instruments at Kew Observatory had showed something happening at the time that they observed the bright light. Carrington included that information in his exhibition at the society meeting, and Hodgson ended his account with, "The magnetic instruments at Kew were simultaneously disturbed to a great extent."

• 36:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  So the magnetometer traces from the Kew Observatory on September 1, 1859, show a sudden, sharp spike in both horizontal force and declination. And there's a note written underneath that reads, "The above movement was nearly coincidental in time with Carrington's observation of a bright eruption on the sun disk over a sunspot." Today, this kind of reading is called a solar flare effect, or SFE, but it has also been described as a magnetic crochet. I don't know why or who named it that. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. On this particular one, one of the spikes does

• 37:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  kind of look like a crochet hook, but there are lots of other ones that don't look that way that are showing similar phenomena.

• 37:42Holly Frey?

  Beyond the readings at Kew Observatory, magnetic observatories all over the world recorded intense disturbances over the course of this event. The readings were off the scale in Brussels, Rome, Toronto, and multiple cities in Russia. Words like violent and very disturbed were used to describe the readings in Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, and Oslo. There were also disturbances in a magnetometer readout from India.

• 38:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  During this event, astronomers and other researchers got so much information about the aurora and the descriptions to the telegraph system and the readings from all of those geomagnetic observatories. This was in part thanks to Elias Loomis, professor of natural philosophy and astronomy at Yale, who did a lot of work collecting reports from all over the world. He edited and published the results of this work as a series of nine articles in the American Journal of Science.

• 38:42Holly Frey?

  All these observations and all this data helped astronomers, physicists, and other researchers conclude something that had already been suspected for a while. In the words of an article in Scientific American in October of 1859, quote, "A connection between the northern lights and forces of electricity and magnetism is now fully established." This also led to a growing understanding that the sun and the aurora were connected. Before this point, the aurora was speculated to be connected to everything from volcanic ash in the atmosphere, to reflections of light from polar ice, to nebulous material falling from space.

• 39:24Holly Frey?

  It also became a precursor to the field of space weather prediction.

• 39:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  And this data from the Carrington event has continued to be used in more recent years to further the understanding of solar phenomena and specifically what happened in 1859. In 2006, scientists from the NASA Goddard Space Center published a paper called "Duration and Extent of the Great Auroral Storm of 1859." This paper described the event as, quote, "arguably the greatest and most famous space weather event in the last 200 years." For the first time, observations showed that the sun and aurora were connected and that auroras generated strong ionospheric currents. These researchers pored over reports from 1859.

• 40:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  They cross-referenced observations of the aurora with incidents at the telegraph stations and the magnetometer readings, tried to get a really precise look at exactly what had happened. This paper also makes it clear just how much was written about the event at the time. Quote, "There are literally several hundred reports that the authors have uncovered that could not be used since they typically do not report a start and stop time of the observed aurora."

• 40:43Holly Frey?

  Of course, more precise instruments for measuring and recording these kinds of phenomena have been developed since 1859. The observation of solar flares became a lot easier with the development of the spectrohelioscope by George Ellery Hale in the 1920s. By the 1940s, astronomers had gathered enough data and observations to definitively connect large solar flares with geomagnetic storms. Apart from just being interesting, this kind of research and projects to study and model the 1859 event may help predict what would happen if another similar event struck the Earth today. The vast majority of large geomagnetic storms happened before there was anything happening

• 41:26Holly Frey?

  on Earth that could be adversely affected by them, beyond maybe people's fear or psychological responses to the lights in the sky.

• 41:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, there were a few reports from 1859 of people seeming kind of drunk or behaving erratically, but overwhelmingly, the reports that I read had more of a sense of awe and wonder rather than fear. Like, they all sounded really poetic. The only things that seemed really alarming to people were, like, the telegraphs suddenly having sparks and catching fire.

• 41:56Holly Frey?

  I am curious, because, you know, at this time, too, the idea of awe had a layer of fear relation to it.

• 42:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 42:05Holly Frey?

  So there may have been some fear in the mix.

• 42:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, but at least in terms of the accounts accessible to me, which are accounts written in English, it seems like in most places, people realized what they were seeing. They had either heard a description of an aurora before, or somebody was there who was like, "Oh, this is the aurora." And it wasn't a matter of people thinking, "Oh, no, the world is ending." It was more of a, "It's the aurora, how cool and profound," right?

• 42:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Anyway, I said at the top of the show that I find this to be a serendipitous story. There were two different people looking at the right place at the right time to see this solar flare. There was a whole newly built array of observatories to record the data about it and the geomagnetic storm that followed it. But the converse of that is that with the development of the telegraph, there was something on Earth that this geomagnetic storm could actually break, at least temporarily. And today, there are way more things that could be damaged or knocked offline by a massive solar event like this, and a lot of them are way more integrated into our daily lives. Like, I read a couple of things that tried to quantify the financial loss of the telegraph

• 43:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  systems being down for about eight hours and, in some cases, having to be repaired. But today, we have things like the power grid and GPS and satellites and the internet, all kinds of things that are all around us and could be knocked offline or destroyed in a similar event.

• 43:42Holly Frey?

  Goodbye connectivity.

• 43:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 43:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Over the last 20 years, various governments and militaries and even banks and insurance companies have sort of looked back at the Carrington event to see what kinds of risks we might be facing today.

• 43:59Holly Frey?

  And a couple of recent events have highlighted these risks. In March of 1989, a coronal mass ejection disabled much of the power distribution network in Quebec, Canada. About 6 million people were without power for nine hours, and restoring power involved rerouting electricity from other stations while damaged equipment was repaired. During that event, the aurora was seen as far south as Florida. And in July of 2012, a massive solar storm narrowly missed Earth. Conveniently, though, it hit the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory A, or Stereo A, which is in orbit around the Sun.

• 44:41Holly Frey?

  So it was simultaneously a close call and also a cool source of new data.

• 44:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. I like, there was another moment of serendipity of it literally hitting a solar observatory.

• 44:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Anyway, that's the Carrington event. Um, I find it fascinating.

• 45:01Holly Frey?

  Do you have some listener mail?

• 45:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do have listener mail. This listener mail is from frequent correspondent Caitlin. And Caitlin wrote after our IUD episode. Caitlin wrote, hi, Tracy and Holly. I was listening to the behind the scenes about IUDs and was so glad to hear about the buffet of pain management options Tracy was offered. Definitely something missing from too many folks' experiences at the GYN. This is perhaps an example of skewed data, but I have definitely noticed a trend towards more compassionate and comprehensive patient care across several medical disciplines over the last decade or so. I'm disabled, so I see a lot of providers for a wide variety of reasons. And I've long been in the habit of assuming that they won't be very familiar with my conditions and the breadth of symptoms.

• 45:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  When I moved for grad school and was getting set up with new folks, I showed up at the dentist with my notebook, full health history, and a textbook about my disability and its systemic implications with a colorful tab on the section about dental concerns. The office photocopied it for my chart, earning my loyal patronage. I don't know if it's because I present myself as well informed and aware of procedures and practices, or if it's a true shift, but the general experience has gone from being told, this needs to happen, sign here, to this is the concern, here's what we recommend, here's other options, and if you follow the recommendation, here is how we can manage pain, anxiety, and any side effects. When I had to get a transvaginal ultrasound, horrid.

• 46:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  An extra nurse came in to hold my hand, and I was offered noise-canceling headphones and was handed a warm blanket while I waited for them to start. It felt so fancy, but that should be the standard. This rambling email to say I'm glad things are shifting, but I also want people to know they can and should advocate for themselves. Asking for basic care and management isn't being precious or demanding, it's asking for basic care. Unfortunately, it isn't always possible to leave a provider who won't listen or isn't respectful of your wishes. There are so many ways to get incremental improvements in your health care. Hope all is well and that Holly is enjoying spring while Tracy and the rest of us up north finish winter. Kaitlyn, this is, this email is from a little more than a month ago.

• 47:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  We are now solidly into spring here in the north. I'm very excited about that. Thank you so much, Kaitlyn, for this email. We also have some photos of recent crimes done by Kaitlyn's Orange Boy Kitty. So we have Orange Boy Kitty with a bow tie up in the top of the closet and in other shelves in the closet, on top of the air conditioner, one of those air conditioners that's like up, up high, mounted through the wall.

• 47:44Holly Frey?

  These are misdemeanors. They're misdemeanors.

• 47:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  I love all of it. And then some very lovely scenes of outdoor snowy, cold looking river. Anyway, so thank you so much, Kaitlyn, for this. So yeah, I think it's been a while, but we sort of talked a little bit on the show about general shifts in medicine in the US and how it has moved some from being like a very paternalistic system where a doctor who was normally male would just sort of hand down pronouncements and not really explain anything. And sometimes would only tell men what was going on. So the husband would get the news and it was up to the husband whether to tell the wife. Like, there've been a lot

• 48:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  of things like that that we've talked about. But I do think, obviously, there are still a lot of folks who have a really hard time accessing care and finding providers that seem like they listen to them. But it does seem like there has been a movement more toward like informed consent for things and being more collaborative with patients.

• 48:53Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  As that was, this email was inspired by the IUD episode and that episode talked about like, there are these recommendations for pain relief now.

• 49:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  And a lot of people are still not being offered pain relief. Which is why I hope that episode would give people a tool that they could use to then say to their doctor, this is actually what the recommendation is now to be offered pain relief. So, so thank you so much, Caitlin, for this email. And then I love all of these pictures of very naughty kitty cat.

• 49:29Holly Frey?

  Misdemeanors.

• 49:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Our bedroom closet, which is honestly, one of the reasons that we bought this house. There's the closet. And then over on the left hand side of the closet, there is a door that I thought was going to lead to like a fuse box or something, like some archaic electrical problem to have to deal with later. No, it is how someone made shelves in the space underneath the attic stairs. So it's like another closet inside the closet. And boy, do both my kitty cats like to get in there anytime I open the closet door because that door doesn't fully shut, the one on the inside.

• 50:11Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 50:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  And love to get in there and sleep on my sweaters.

• 50:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I just let them at this point. I'm like, I'm going to be covered in your fur anyway, so.

• 50:22Holly Frey?

  I have some cat crime we could discuss on Friday. I'm not proud of it. Embarrassed by my child.

• 50:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  So thank you so much again, Caitlin, for this email and for all your many emails that you sent to us. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected]. If you would like to see the show notes for this episode, it is our website, which is missedinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

• 50:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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