Lighted up by an immense conflagration
The heavens had assumed their usual appearance and the stars shown out bright as ever
He lurched out of bed shortly after midnight. The night sky was awash with colors bright enough to read the the newspaper’s small print by. Confusion set in immediately. Making a bed outdoors in the thin Rocky Mountain air, the reporter couldn’t make neither heads or tails of the daylight illuminating the camp. A few of the men began making breakfast, certain that dawn had broken.
“The light continued until morning, varying in intensity in different parts of the heavens, and slowly changing position,” he later noted in The Rocky Mountain News. “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 fifty hours before, only ceasing about twelve hours before the auroral light.”
Fifty-Niner prospectors, camped out for a new gold rush, spotted the lights an hour prior. When the glow began weakly around 11PM, they chalked things up to a fire, far off in the distance. Over the next hour, however, it became clear that it was something else altogether.
“[A]t one o’clock the light began to fade and in an hour the heavens had assumed their usual appearance and the stars shown out bright as ever,” they recounted in the Rocky Mountain Gold Reporter.
Telegraph operators had plenty of cause to worry. Theirs was still a young field. It hadn’t been 20 years since Samuel Morse had been granted a patent for the technology, nor had 15 years passed since the first public telegraph office opened in Washington D.C. A year prior, transatlantic cables had been laid along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, only to fail within three weeks. It would three more years before Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph system from D.C. to California.
Their troubles began prior to the fire in the sky. “Never in my experience of fifteen years in working telegraph lines have I witnessed anything like the extraordinary effect of the Aurora Borealis between Quebec and Father Point last night,” a veteran operator noted in New York State’s Rochester Union and Advertiser.
Within a couple of nights, things would grow far stranger for the industry in North America and Europe alike. Telegraph pylons began emitting sparks, causing fires in some stations, while numerous operators reported receiving electrical shocks from their systems. Stranger still, machines continued to operate after being disconnected from their power source. The Boston Evening Traveler published a transcript from of the strangest such example, an exchange between operators in Boston and Portland, Maine.
Boston operator (to Portland operator): Please cut off your battery entirely for fifteen minutes.
Portland operator: Will do so. It is now disconnected.
Boston: Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?
Portland: Better than with our batteries on. – Current comes and goes gradually.
Boston: My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble.
Portland: Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?
Boston: Yes. Go ahead.
Current strength came and went, but the two men were able to carry on the conversation for the better part of two hours, no battery required.
Posted up at his station, Richard Carrington became one of the first two people to identity a solar flare, discovering the phenomenon simultaneously with fellow amateur astronomer, Richard Hodgson.
“While engaged in the fornenoon of Thursday, Sept. 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,” Carrington would note. “The image of the sun’s disk was, as usual with me, projected on to a plate of glass coated with distemper of a pale straw colour, and at a distance and under a power which I presented a picture of about 11 inches in diameter.”
The solar flare erupted at the height of the Carrington Event. More than a century and a half later, it remains the most intense geomagnetic storm on record. Auroras stretched across the planet, to Japan, Columbia, Australia and the Caribbean.
Harpers recounts the story of a young woman who quickly grew convinced the phenomenon was a display of divine retribution. “[H]er agitated state necessitated that she be moved to the lunatic asylum,” the magazine notes. “The conclusion drawn from this, and no doubt her utterances, implied that she had become deranged from viewing the aurora borealis a short time ago. She was convinced that all of this spectacular auroral activity meant that the world was soon to come to an end.”
The Colorado gold miners, on the other hand, fell back to sleep soon after. It was concerning, certainly, but not so much that it warranted ruining a perfectly good night’s sleep after a long day of labor.
Sources:
Description of a Singular Appearance seen in the Sun on September 1, 1859
https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1859MNRAS..20...13C
Solar Storm 1859 https://www.solarstorms.org/SS1859.html
1859’s “Great Auroral Storm”—the week the Sun touched the earth https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-stormthe-week-the-sun-touched-the-earth/