Contributed by: filbert Friday, September 04 2009 @ 11:05 AM CST
On Sept. 2, 1859, at the telegraph office at No. 31 State Street in Boston at 9:30 a.m., the operators’ lines were overflowing with current, so they unplugged the batteries connected to their machines, and kept working using just the electricity coursing through the air.
In the wee hours of that night, the most brilliant auroras ever recorded had broken out across the skies of the Earth. People in Havana and Florida reported seeing them. The New York Times ran a 3,000 word feature recording the colorful event in purple prose.
“With this a beautiful tint of pink finally mingled. The clouds of this color were most abundant to the northeast and northwest of the zenith,” the Times wrote. “There they shot across one another, intermingling and deepening until the sky was painfully lurid. There was no figure the imagination could not find portrayed by these instantaneous flashes.”
As if what was happening in the heavens wasn’t enough, the communications infrastructure just beginning to stretch along the eastern seaboard was going haywire from all the electromagnetism.
If that same solar flare (or “coronal mass ejection”) happened today, it would mess up modern civilization pretty seriously. Put it down on your list of things to worry about.
Via Instapundit[*2]