In 1859 a Solar Storm Set Telegraph Offices on Fire — the Next One Could Cost Trillions
Answers: “what was the carrington event?”
On September 1, 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots when he saw two brilliant beads of white light erupt across the Sun’s surface. He’d just witnessed the most powerful solar flare in recorded history — and 17 hours later, the storm it launched slammed into Earth.
What happened next, in a world with almost no electrical technology, was still astonishing:
- Auroras blazed over the Caribbean, Hawaii, and Colombia — normally a polar phenomenon, now lighting up the tropics. In the northeastern US, people reportedly read newspapers by the auroral glow at midnight.
- Telegraph systems went haywire across Europe and North America. Operators got electric shocks. Some machines threw sparks and set paper on fire. Eerily, a few telegraphs kept working after operators disconnected the batteries — powered by the current the storm itself induced in the wires.
The Carrington Event was a coronal mass ejection: a billion-tonne cloud of magnetized solar plasma, fired straight at Earth, that slammed into our magnetic field and induced electric currents across the planet’s surface.
In 1859, with only telegraphs to disrupt, it was a curiosity. Today, the same storm would be a civilization-scale emergency. Our world is a web of long conductors — power grids, pipelines, undersea cables — that act as giant antennas for storm-induced currents. A modern Carrington Event could:
- Blow out high-voltage transformers, which take months or years to replace, causing long, wide-area blackouts
- Knock out or degrade satellites, GPS, and radio communications
- Cause economic damage estimated in the trillions of dollars
This isn’t hypothetical fear-mongering. In 1989, a lesser storm blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec in 90 seconds. In 2012, a Carrington-class eruption crossed Earth’s orbit and missed us by about a week.
The Sun fires these off regularly. It’s simply a matter of when one is aimed at us — which is why space-weather forecasting has quietly become critical infrastructure.