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The Spark in Washington
We begin in Washington, D.C., on the evening of Sunday, August 28, 1859.
Inside a telegraph office, Frederick Royce is hunched over his desk, trying to connect to Richmond, Virginia.
For five or ten minutes, the current holds. Then, without warning, it fades away. Seconds later, a surge of electricity surges up through the earth, flooding the wire. It slams the receiver’s iron armature flat against the electromagnet, pinning it like a vise. Royce tries to pry it loose, but he can’t budge it. Without the ability to tap out Morse code, he can’t work.
Then the surge relents. The lever snaps free. Royce tries again.
He taps out the call for Richmond, resting one hand against the desk’s iron plate. Leaning closer to the wall to catch any faint audible click from the sounder, his forehead brushes against an exposed wire.
A spark arcs from his brow into the brass instrument. Royce collapses to the floor — he’s knocked senseless in his own office.
A few feet away, an elderly bystander looks down at the stunned operator and says: “I saw the spark jump from your forehead to the sounder.”
Royce doesn’t know it yet, but he’s just been struck by the leading edge of a storm building ninety-three million miles away, on the surface of the Sun. And a second blast is getting ready to break.
Richard Carrington and the First Solar Flare
It’s now four days later. The first of September, 1859, in Surrey, England.
Thirty-three-year-old Richard Carrington climbs into the dome of his private observatory.
He is a wealthy brewer’s son who chose the sky over the family trade only to be dragged back to run the business when his father died the year before. In his career, he has already earned acclaim mapping thousands of faint northern stars, but lately his obsession has turned toward the day.
Recognizing that records of the Sun are practically nonexistent, he has committed himself to tracking sunspots across an entire eleven-year solar cycle. Every clear morning, he sits in the observatory, projects an eleven-inch image of the Sun onto a straw-colored screen, and sketches what he sees.
On this Thursday morning, he’s tracking a sunspot cluster so large it’s been visible for days.
The clock reads 11:18 AM.
Two twin points of white light ignite right above the dark sunspot patches. Carrington’s first instinct is practical: a pinhole in his apparatus, letting a stray beam of sunlight leak through. He nudges the telescope’s barrel, expecting the light to slide across the paper.
It doesn’t move. The points swell into two kidney-shaped flares that outshine the Sun’s surface itself.
Carrington stares in disbelief. He bolts from the room, shouting down the hall for someone — anyone — to witness what is unfolding.
He’s back in under a minute.
By his own clock, it’s 11:23. It’s now been five minutes, and the flare dissolves. The Sun looks completely normal again.
He isn’t alone. Across London, an amateur astronomer named Richard Hodgson is watching the Sun too. His clock reads a couple of minutes behind Carrington’s, but he sees much the same thing. He’d later write:
“While observing a group of solar spots on the 1st September, I was suddenly surprised at the appearance of a very brilliant star of light, much brighter than the sun’s surface, most dazzling to the protected eye, illuminating the upper edges of the adjacent spots and streaks, not unlike in effect the edging of the clouds at sunset; the rays extended in all directions; and the centre might be compared to the dazzling brilliancy of [a] bright star. It lasted for some five minutes, and disappeared instantaneously about 11.25 a.m.”
Neither of them knew what they were witnessing. In truth, they had just watched the first solar flare ever recorded by a human.
The flash they both saw was just light. It completed the ninety-three-million-mile journey to Earth in just over eight minutes.
Think of it like merely a muzzle flash, and riding right behind it is the cannonball: a coronal mass ejection.
Billions of tons of superheated, magnetized plasma, blasted into space at five million miles an hour. Normally, that journey takes three to four days. But the storm that struck Frederick Royce four nights earlier had already swept the path to Earth clean — no solar wind left to slow this second wave down. It crosses to us in less than eighteen hours.
Spectacle of Light
It’s evening now on September 1st in New York City.
New Yorkers start noticing a crimson light on the northern horizon. They gather at street corners and climb onto flat rooftops. Waves of light shift from red to orange, and orange to pale gold. It stretches from the north to the top of the sky. On Broadway, people stand on the pavement holding up ordinary newspapers. And they can read the fine print by the sky’s own glow!
Two time zones west, the red wave rolls over the Colorado Territory.
It is 11:00 PM at Gregory Gulch, a mining camp wedged into the Front Range of the Rockies. It’s located near the towns we know today as Central City and Black Hawk. And you know, in my imagination, I can picture this well. I grew up about a 30-minute drive from there. Above the site of tents and sluice boxes, a red light spreads low across the northeastern sky. At first, the miners wonder if it’s a fire on a distant ridge. But it starts spreading sideways.
By half past eleven, it’s no longer just a dim red glow. It’s getting really bright. In fact, the stars are getting washed out — one by one! Within the hour, it is, in the words of the men watching it, “almost as light as day.”
Higher up the mountain, another group of miners is jolted awake a little after midnight. Some of the men insist it’s actually morning. They get up, build the cooking fires, and start making breakfast. Curtains of light shift and pulse across the sky until around one o’clock, and then they start to fade. By two that morning, the mountain night looks ordinary again.
Moving further west, it’s half past eleven in San Francisco. The red glare bathes the roof, streets, and open fields. The sky looks like a field of grain in the wind. Beneath it, the dark waters of San Francisco Bay catch the scarlet hue from above.
Days later, the San Francisco Herald would report: “Nothing could exceed the grandeur and beauty of the sight; the effect was almost bewildering, and was witnessed with mingled feelings of awe and delight by thousands.”
Now, this wasn’t just an American spectacle. People watched this in many places across the globe. In the Caribbean, crowds packed town plazas, convinced neighboring islands were burning to the waterline.
In San Salvador, nightwatchmen and sailors step out onto the docks around ten o’clock. They see the sky and waters much like those in San Francisco.
“The light was equal to that of daybreak,” the local paper reported, “but was not sufficient to eclipse the light of the stars. The sea reflected the color, and appeared as if of blood. This lasted until three in the morning, when a dense black cloud arose in the east, and commenced to spread over the colored portion of the heavens, presenting a most curious spectacle; for in the parts where the cloud was not dense enough, the red light shone through, and formed a thousand fantastic figures, as if painted with fire on a black ground.”
When the Telegraph Ran on Auroral Power
While people across the globe watched the skies, the modern world’s newest technology, the telegraph, was taking the blow.
Ever since the first copper wires were strung across the countryside, operators had noticed that the northern lights could summon phantom currents into their lines.
In New York, an operator named J.C. Crosson struggles with power surges on his line. He walks outside to confirm his suspicion. As he later told the papers:
“Upon looking out the doors I perceived broad rays of light extending from the zenith toward the horizon in almost every direction. I then concluded the difficulty arose from the mysterious influence of the Aurora Borealis.”
The atmosphere itself was muscling in on the circuit.
By Friday morning, September 2nd, the crimson displays fade into daylight. But the energy has not vanished. High overhead, the solar tempest continues to rattle the planet’s magnetic shield. Across hundreds of miles of terrain, that cosmic disturbance acted like a massive electrical generator.
At eight o’clock in the morning, telegraph operators across New England arrive at their posts. In Boston, the operator takes his seat on the American Telegraph Line connecting north to Portland, Maine. He reaches for the key, but the line is jammed. The wires are drenched in uncontrollable power.
Normally, sending a message requires heavy banks of chemical batteries to push direct current down the copper line. But the solar storm had taken over the line, flooding the wires with more power than their acid cells ever could.
Drawing on years of experience, the operator decides to try an experiment. He taps out a proposal to Maine:
Boston operator: “Please cut off your battery entirely from the line 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.”
For the next two hours, the two cities tap out telegrams across a disconnected line — their instruments driven by the current of a solar storm.
In the days that followed, as the auroras receded and the global reports began to trickle in, Carrington sat down to assemble the puzzle.
He pulled the magnetic needle recordings from the Kew Observatory in London, which had jumped at the exact moment the twin flares had erupted on his screen.
He began to suspect an invisible thread between the two events—that a sudden eruption on the Sun had transmitted its shockwave across ninety-three million miles to disturb the Earth.
Tragedy and Isolation
Carrington wanted a lifetime to chase it as the years passed. Instead, the establishment he longed to lead closed ranks. When the directorship of the Cambridge Observatory opened in 1861, Carrington applied, hoping to return to his alma mater. Instead, he was passed over for John Couch Adams, his candidacy poisoned by Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy, who didn’t take kindly to Carrington.
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Carrington protested that appointment, but the door remained shut. Professional exile, failing health, and the unwanted burden of running his family’s brewery wore him down.
In the spring of 1861, he ceased his solar observations, sold off his instruments, and abandoned his observatory at Redhill.
And he withdrew to an isolated estate on a hill in Surrey.
But that sanctuary wouldn’t last.
In 1869, already an ailing recluse in his forties, Carrington married a younger woman named Rosa Helen Rodway. But Rosa carried a turbulent past into the secluded estate. This included an older former lover named William, whom she had falsely introduced as her brother.
It is Saturday, around noon, on August 19th, 1871. Carrington is away from the estate.
William appears at the door. Rosa approaches, demanding, “Why did you come here?”
William grips a stick in his hand, points it down toward the dirt, and growls: “I raised you from that. I want the money you owe me — the shawl, the cloak, and the little dog, too.”
“I will pack up the shawl and cloak and send them to the inn,” she replies, “but I cannot give up the dog until Mr. Carrington returns.”
Within moments, William pulls a knife and lunges. He plunges the blade into her back. Rosa fights desperately for her life, grabbing the blade with her bare hand to wrench it free.
As William turns the weapon on himself, Rosa jumps to her feet and bolts out the door.
Rosa runs down the hill toward the local inn, pursued by William, who yells that they will meet in heaven.
Rosa survived, and William was sentenced to prison, but Carrington’s sanctuary was utterly destroyed. The sensational hearings dragged his private life across the front pages of the British press. Traumatized and in chronic pain, Rosa was prescribed heavy doses of chloral hydrate to sleep.
Four years later, in November 1875, she was found dead in her bed from an overdose.
Carrington was broken.
Ten days after her death, Richard Carrington was found dead in his own bed. He was just forty-nine years old.
The man who had witnessed the most powerful solar storm anyone had ever recorded died an outcast, largely alienated from the scientific community he had longed to join.
Yet history had not finished with Richard Carrington.
He would never see satellites slip into orbit. He could never have imagined the instruments that would one day photograph the Sun in ultraviolet and X-rays.
But more than a century later, modern solar physicists are still following the path he helped open.
Today, astronomers constantly watch the Sun, searching for the warning signs of another great storm.
And when scientists speak of the most powerful solar storms in history, they still speak his name.
Richard Carrington.
In the end, he caught the Sun in the act, and tethered his name to the heavens forever.
Sources and Further Reading
Clark, S. (2007). Astronomical fire: Richard Carrington and the solar flare of 1859. Endeavour, 31(3), 104–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2007.07.004
Clark, S. (2007). The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began. Princeton University Press.
Green, J. L., Boardsen, S., Odenwald, S., Humble, J., & Pazamickas, K. A. (2006). Eyewitness reports of the great auroral storm of 1859. Advances in Space Research, 38(2), 145–154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2005.12.021
Loomis, E. (1860). On the great auroral exhibition of August 28th to September 4th, 1859, and on auroras generally. American Journal of Science and Arts, 30(88), 79–94.
Tsurutani, B. T., Gonzalez, W. D., Lakhina, G. S., & Alex, S. (2003). The extreme magnetic storm of 1–2 September 1859. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 108(A7), 1268. https://doi.org/10.1029/2002JA009504