For most of human history, our Sun’s occasional tantrums have been of little concern to those of us living on Earth’s surface. At most, the emissions of plasma crashing into our atmosphere might paint the sky in pretty shades of green or pink.
With the development of electrical networks in the mid-19th century came the potential for solar activity to impact our planet in a whole new way, as charged particles guided by our magnetic field could now induce surges in current through circuitry below and interfere with our communication.
While the threat of solar activity disrupting modern technology is an ever-pressing concern for us today, it’s a point of curiosity (and due diligence in scientific record-keeping) to accurately pinpoint the very first moment the Sun made a mess of our electronic chit-chat.
In 2013, Baylor University space historian William B. Cade found an anonymous report in an old issue of Nature claiming a “very intense magnetic disturbance” was responsible for a train delay in England in 1841. If verified, it would be the earliest known instance of a solar storm impacting our technology.
Working with fellow researchers, Cade now has a good reason to believe the Nature report is more than likely inaccurate – the train’s rail route didn’t exist until 1846.
To get to the bottom of the mystery of the article’s spurious dating, Cade and a team of researchers from around the globe sifted through historic reports and observations of geomagnetic activity to set the record straight.
The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph may be considered the earliest commercial form of long-distance electronic communication. It utilized changes in electrical current to rotate magnetized needles on a display board, allowing coded messages to be transmitted quickly through a handful of wires across large distances.
Robert Stephenson’s burgeoning locomotive system was the perfect early adopter of this revolutionary communications network. While experimental versions of the technology date to the mid-1830s, it wasn’t until July 1837 that a full-scale version was installed along an early London rail line.
Still, at barely a mile long, there was little potential for geomagnetic activity to make its presence known to operators. Only with the advent of more powerful batteries could transmission lines be extended, leading to the steady rolling out of wiring across numerous rail networks in the early 1840s.
By the end of the decade, there were already suspicions of a curious connection between the sky and telegraph activity, with the civil engineer William Barlow informing the Royal Society of “strong alternating deflections” of telegraph needles across numerous railway networks on the evening of March 19, 1847, right when a “brilliant aurora” was seen.
On October 5, 1871, an unknown author made a very similar observation about an event in the earliest days of the railway’s telegraph, writing;
“On the 18th of October 1841, a very intense magnetic disturbance was recorded, and amongst other curious facts mentioned is that of the detention of the 10.05 PM express train at Exeter sixteen minutes, as from the magnetic disturbance it was impossible to ascertain if the line was clear at Starcross. The superintendent at Exeter reported the next morning that someone was playing tricks with the instruments, and would not let them work.”
After confirming that the line from Exeter that ran through the village of Starcross didn’t open until the end of May, 1846, Cade and his team turned to the schedule for additional clues.
There was, in fact, a 10.05 PM service from Exeter – in 1848 and 1849.
Newspaper reports and records in the archives of the Greenwich Observatory revealed another important clue. The skies over England were bright with auroras on October 18, 1848, as the Sun was entering a more active phase in its solar cycle.
All signs were pointing to a simple typographical error, where Nature had printed 1841 instead of the correct year of 1848.
To non-historians, the difference of a few years might seem rather trivial. Yet researchers often comb historical records for signs of astronomical phenomena, using dates of anomalous observations to hunt for patterns that might help us better understand our Universe.
This research was published in Space Weather.
Source: Baylor University
