The Day the Sun Hit Earth

Narrator: A little after midnight, high up in the Rocky Mountains, a party sleeping in the open woke up because it was light out.

Narrator: You could read print by it.

Narrator: They looked at the sky, and they talked it over, and some of them insisted it was daylight.

Narrator: They got up and started breakfast.

Narrator: That same night in New Orleans, some of the fire companies thought part of the city was burning down.

Narrator: That same week, a gentleman there shot three larks at about one o'clock in the morning.

Narrator: They had come out for the day.

Narrator: And the next morning in Boston, in broad daylight, a telegraph operator took the battery off his line, and went on sending messages.

Narrator: All that night, people had looked up from Canada to the Caribbean, and not one of them knew where it came from.

Narrator: One man came close.

Narrator: Seventeen and a half hours before it hit, he saw the flash.

Narrator: And he nearly missed it, because at the biggest moment of his working life, he ran out of the room.

Narrator: In 2012, another one like it came off the Sun.

Narrator: It missed.

Narrator: Richard Carrington was thirty three.

Narrator: His father owned a large brewery at Brentford, and the family plan was for Richard to go into the church.

Narrator: He went up to Cambridge, sat through some lectures on astronomy, and that was the end of the church.

Narrator: He built himself a house on a hill in Surrey with an observatory in it.

Narrator: And on every clear day for years, he pointed a telescope at the Sun, threw the image onto a screen, and drew what he saw.

Narrator: Every spot, by hand.

Narrator: Nobody asked him to.

Narrator: Before he was done it came to 5,290 observations, of 954 groups of spots.

Narrator: Then in the summer of 1858 his father died, and the brewery came to Richard.

Narrator: So that's where we find him.

Narrator: He knows as much about sunspots as nearly anyone alive, and he has a brewery to run.

Narrator: There was one other thing in 1859 that hadn't been around long.

Narrator: More than a hundred thousand miles of telegraph wire had been strung across the world.

Narrator: It worked like this.

Narrator: A battery pushes current down a wire.

Narrator: A man presses a key, and a magnet clicks in a town two hundred miles off.

Narrator: Battery, wire, click.

Narrator: That's the whole machine.

Narrator: Hold on to the battery. We'll want it later.

Narrator: Four nights before that breakfast, on Sunday, August the 28th, the wires went bad.

Narrator: In New York at half past seven, an operator named J.C. Crosson couldn't hold a steady current.

Narrator: He looked out the door, and there were rays of light running down the sky in almost every direction.

Narrator: Up between Quebec and Father Point, good men worked from eight in the evening until one in the morning, trying to get four hundred words across.

Narrator: That's fewer words than you've heard from me so far.

Narrator: They closed the line.

Narrator: In Washington, Frederick Royce was calling Richmond when he leaned toward his machine, and his forehead brushed a wire on the wall.

Narrator: He got, he said, a very severe electric shock.

Narrator: An old man was sitting a few feet away.

Narrator: He said he saw a spark of fire jump from Royce's forehead to the machine.

Narrator: The newspaper doesn't say what the old man did next.

Narrator: By morning it was over.

Narrator: Everybody went back to work.

Narrator: The Sun was ninety three million miles away, and hardly anybody had a reason to look at it.

Narrator: Carrington looked at it every clear day.

Narrator: Thursday, September the 1st, eighteen minutes past eleven.

Narrator: He says he's good to within fifteen seconds.

Narrator: There's a big group of spots on the Sun.

Narrator: Carrington has just finished drawing it, and he's timing the spots against a clock.

Narrator: And two patches of light break out on top of them.

Narrator: He wrote that they were white. Intensely bright and white.

Narrator: We're painting them red, so you can follow them.

Narrator: From here on, red is this thing, and most of the way, nobody could see it.

Narrator: His first thought is that there's a hole in his equipment.

Narrator: He moves the telescope to check.

Narrator: It isn't a hole.

Narrator: He writes down the time.

Narrator: So far, so careful.

Narrator: Then he does what any of us would do.

Richard Carrington: Being somewhat flurried by the surprise, I hastily ran to call some one to witness the exhibition with me.

Narrator: Nearly six years he'd been at that telescope, and he went to get somebody.

Richard Carrington: And on returning within sixty seconds, was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled.

Narrator: Mortified.

Narrator: That's the word he picked, and he sent it to the Royal Astronomical Society to be printed.

Narrator: It lasted about five minutes. It was the first solar flare anybody ever recorded.

Narrator: He needn't have worried about the witness.

Narrator: At Highgate, north of London, a man named Richard Hodgson happened to be looking at the Sun that same morning, and he saw it too.

Narrator: And Carrington would not write to him to compare notes, so that nobody could say one account had colored the other.

Narrator: Within a few minutes, at the observatory at Kew, a hanging magnet twitched.

Narrator: It kept its own record, a spot of light falling on photographic paper, and the line jumped.

Narrator: Nobody saw it until the paper was developed.

Narrator: The light from the Sun gets here in about eight minutes.

Narrator: So the flash had already arrived.

Narrator: What came behind it takes longer.

Narrator: What left the Sun that morning was a cloud of the Sun itself, billions of tons of it.

Narrator: A cloud like that generally takes days to cross.

Narrator: This one may have had a clear road, because Sunday's storm seems to have swept the way.

Narrator: It would be here in seventeen and a half hours.

Narrator: Nobody knew. So this is the rest of Thursday.

Narrator: Carrington keeps watch for nearly an hour. Nothing else happens. He goes back to his spots.

Narrator: In New York somebody wires the price of something to somebody.

Narrator: In the Rockies it has rained for fifty hours, and around noon it quits.

Narrator: Tonight a party's going to sleep out in the open.

Narrator: While it's coming, here's what it's going to do.

Narrator: The Earth has a magnetic field. It's what turns a compass needle.

Narrator: An Englishman named Michael Faraday had shown twenty eight years earlier that if you move a magnetic field past a wire, you get electricity in the wire.

Narrator: It's how nearly every power plant in the world works today.

Narrator: You don't need a battery. You need a wire and a moving field.

Narrator: The wire's already up, more than a hundred thousand miles of it.

Narrator: The moon's a crescent, and it'll be down before nine.

Narrator: It's going to be a very dark night.

Narrator: In London it's just before five in the morning. In North America it's still Thursday night.

Narrator: When that cloud arrived, the whole field shook.

Narrator: Sunday had been a bad night. This one moved the needle about twice as fast.

Narrator: At Kew the magnet swung so hard that its line ran off the paper again.

Narrator: And the current came down into the wires.

Narrator: In Norway, sparks off the wires set pieces of paper on fire.

Narrator: And this is the one time in this story the red is something you could see for yourself.

Narrator: Blood red, they called it. Deep crimson.

Narrator: It reached the tropics. They saw it along the north coast of Cuba.

Narrator: In Washington, you could read the face of your watch.

Narrator: In the gold country, a paper reported that by half past eleven it began to look like day breaking, and within the hour the stars had gone out.

Narrator: And up in the Rockies, a party got up and started breakfast.

Narrator: In New Orleans, a paper called the Picayune reported it was an indisputable fact that old topers, wholesale consumers of the alcoholic fluid, had fallen dead drunk before they'd had their regular allowance.

Narrator: The paper blamed the sky.

Narrator: Richard Carrington, brewer, might have had another theory.

Narrator: By Friday morning it was broad daylight, and you couldn't see a thing.

Narrator: But when the offices opened at eight, the wires still weren't right.

Narrator: In Washington, the operators found what one paper called a series of electrical currents, entirely independent of the batteries, in possession of the wires.

Narrator: In Boston they couldn't get a thing done until half past eight.

Narrator: The current on their line to Portland, Maine, kept coming and going in waves.

Narrator: So Boston asked Portland to try something.

Boston operator: Please cut off your battery entirely from the line for fifteen minutes.

Portland operator: Will do so. It is now disconnected.

Boston operator: Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?

Portland operator: Better than with our batteries on.

Narrator: There are two men, a hundred miles apart, with no battery at all, talking down a wire that's being run by the Sun.

Boston operator: Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble.

Portland operator: Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?

Boston operator: Yes. Go ahead.

Narrator: It was as strong a magnetic storm as anyone has ever recorded.

Narrator: The night before, the sky had been red from Canada to Cuba.

Narrator: And what those two men had to say about it was, yes, go ahead.

Narrator: They worked that way for about two hours.

Narrator: I've known men like that. You want them around.

Narrator: Then it faded, and the wires were just wires again. The papers argued about electricity.

Narrator: Carrington had the whole thing in his hands.

Narrator: A flash on the Sun on Thursday morning.

Narrator: A twitch in a magnet at Kew within minutes.

Narrator: And seventeen and a half hours later, the biggest storm anyone had ever seen.

Narrator: That November he stood before the Royal Astronomical Society and showed them his drawing.

Narrator: He told them about the storm too. The Society's notes put what he said like this.

Narrator: While the contemporary occurrence may deserve noting, he would not have it supposed that he even leans towards hastily connecting them.

Narrator: One swallow does not make a summer.

Narrator: He had the flash and he had the storm on the same table, and he wouldn't connect them, because once isn't proof.

Narrator: That's the job done right. It's also hard to watch.

Narrator: Sixteen months later he gave up the sun work.

Narrator: The brewery had won.

Narrator: Today it's named for him. They call it the Carrington Event.

Narrator: He would want it noted that he does not lean towards that.

Narrator: Shake a magnetic field and any long wire fills with current.

Narrator: That hasn't changed.

Narrator: What's changed is the wire.

Narrator: March of 1989. A smaller storm hit, and the whole power grid in Quebec went down in about a minute.

Narrator: Six million people, more than nine hours.

Narrator: February of 2022. SpaceX put up forty nine satellites.

Narrator: A minor storm thickened the air they were flying through, and thirty eight of them came down.

Narrator: And then there's July the 23rd, 2012.

Narrator: The Sun threw another one.

Narrator: A NASA spacecraft happened to be in the way, took it head on, and radioed home.

Narrator: A scientist named Daniel Baker, who studied it, says it was at least as strong as Carrington's.

Narrator: A week earlier, the spot it came from was still facing us.

Narrator: The Sun turns.

Narrator: By that morning it had turned away.

Daniel Baker: The only difference is, it missed.

Narrator: Most newspapers didn't mention it.

Narrator: A National Academy report says a hit like that could cost up to two trillion dollars in the first year.

Narrator: The big transformers it could burn out might take years to repair.

Narrator: One scientist put the odds of another direct hit at about twelve percent in any ten years.

Narrator: He and others have since come in lower, some as low as one percent.

Narrator: Nobody really knows.

Narrator: Nobody can stop one. The Sun doesn't know we're here.

Narrator: We have satellites watching.

Narrator: A fast one might give us most of a day, and the last sure word comes fifteen minutes to an hour out.

Narrator: That's time enough to look at what's on the line, ease off what you can, and keep working.

Portland operator: Shall I go ahead with business?

Boston operator: Yes. Go ahead.