Researchers say the rail telegraph incident happened in 1848, not 1841
An international study has found that one of the earliest recorded cases of space weather disrupting technology happened in 1848, not 1841.
Researchers re-examined accounts of a train delayed in Exeter, England, after the sun’s energy disrupted the railway telegraph system. Lancaster University led the work with scientists from RMIT University, the British Geological Survey, Natural Resources Canada, Baylor University and RAL Space.
In the 1870s, an anonymous author in Nature described a “very intense magnetic disturbance” on 18 October 1841. That account said the event interfered with train signals and delayed the 10:05pm departure from Exeter by 16 minutes.
Exeter line opened in 1846
Associate Professor Brett Carter of RMIT University helped investigate the archives. He said the team found a key problem: the railway line named in the old account did not open until 1846, almost five years after the alleged 1841 incident.
“In this study, we effectively investigated what had to be a typo in a Nature paper from 1871,” Carter said. “We know it was a typo because the Exeter-to-Starcross train line mentioned in that paper didn’t exist until 1846, which is 5 years afterwards.”
Next, the team compared railway timetables, historical newspapers, solar observations, auroral reports and digitised geomagnetic records. That review found the incident most likely took place on 18 October 1848.
As a result, the Exeter case is no longer treated as the earliest known example of space weather affecting human technology. However, the researchers say it still ranks among the earliest documented cases.
Space weather had already caused problems for early telegraph operators in the 1840s, when some of the first electric telegraph networks were being built. Disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field created unexplained electrical effects on those systems.
Years later, a much larger event showed how severe those effects could become. The 1859 Carrington Event caused aurora borealis as far south as Hawaii and Central America, while telegraph systems around the world failed.
During that 1859 storm, sparking lines shocked operators and some equipment caught fire. Some telegraph systems even ran without batteries because geomagnetic currents in the wires powered them.
