September 2, 1859, was a terrible day to be working in the information industry. Telegraph machines around the world behaved as if possessed. They spat out electric shocks and set telegraph paper on fire. Some of the machines continued to send and receive messages even after they were disconnected from the batteries that powered them.
One man saw how it all began. The day before, Richard Carrington, a British brewer’s son who rose to be the foremost solar astronomer of the time, had observed an extraordinary event. He was examining an 11-inch-wide projected image of the sun, part of his routine monitoring of the solar surface, when he noted the eruption of “two patches of intensely bright and white light ... the brilliancy ... fully equal to that of direct sun-light.” Carrington knew he was witnessing an enormous explosion, nearly as bright as all the rest of the sun put together. It was the first time anyone had observed a solar flare, and the first time anyone had seen a solar event produce such tangible consequences on Earth.
Fortunately, those consequences were modest, since the telegraph pretty much defined the beginning and the end of high tech in the middle of the 19th century. If the same event happened today, the story would be drastically different. Flares and the broader solar eruptions associated with them unleash storms of charged particles, emit flashes of energetic X-rays, and temporarily mangle our planet’s magnetic field. Even for regular-strength flares, those effects can fry electronics in space and overload power transformers on the ground.
