In 1859 the aurora was so bright that gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke in the night and began making breakfast, thinking it was morning.

1859

The lights were seen as far south as Cuba and Hawaii.

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The event

• The Carrington Event1859 · Redhill, England. On 1 September 1859 astronomer Richard Carrington saw a brilliant flare on the Sun; within a day the strongest geomagnetic storm on record hit Earth. Auroras lit up the tropics, telegraphs sparked, and some lines ran with their batteries disconnected, on current induced by the storm.

19th century

More amazing facts

• 1858 The first transatlantic telegram took 16 hours to send: Queen Victoria's 98-word greeting to the US president in 1858.
• 1859 · 1869 Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Mendeleev's periodic law (1869) are just ten years apart.
• 1859 Big Ben is still regulated with old pennies.
• 1859 · 1872 The only casualty of the Pig War between the US and Britain was a pig. The border dispute that began with a farmer’s shot in 1859 dragged on for 13 years and was settled by an arbitrator: the German Kaiser.
• 1859 In 1859 telegraph operators sent messages without batteries; space supplied the power.
• 1859 · 1915 Having found Neptune on paper, Le Verrier used the same method to predict a planet that isn't there.

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