Study Finds 1841 'First' Space Weather Report Was Actually a Typo for 1848

For more than a decade, a brief, anonymous item published in Nature in 1871 has held a special place in the history of space weather research. It described a "very intense magnetic disturbance" that delayed a train in Exeter, on England's southern coast, in October 1841 — a date that, if accurate, would predate the famous Carrington Event of 1859 by nearly two decades as the earliest known instance of space weather disrupting human technology. A new study in the journal Space Weather concludes that the account was real, but the date was not. The disturbance almost certainly happened seven years later, in 1848, and the discrepancy appears to boil down to a simple typo.

The Carrington Event remains the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record. Auroras blazed across the globe, some bright enough to read a newspaper by, while telegraph stations sparked and occasionally caught fire. The telegraph, still a new technology at the time, was knocked out in many places by the geomagnetically induced currents from what was likely a coronal mass ejection. Some operators found they could keep sending and receiving messages after disconnecting their batteries entirely, powered solely by the storm-induced current in the lines.

A similarly powerful storm today would pose a far greater threat, given modern society's dependence on power grids and satellites. That risk is why researchers are eager to mine the historical record for earlier storms: understanding how often extreme space weather has struck in the past helps refine predictions of when it might strike again.

That is what drew Jim Wild of Lancaster University and his co-authors to the 1841 Nature report, which described how a telegraph operator's inability to confirm whether the line was clear delayed the departure of a 10:05 p.m. express train at Exeter by 16 minutes. But the details didn't add up. The report was unsigned and had been published 30 years after the event it described. More tellingly, historical records show the railway line in question wasn't even built yet in 1841: the South Devon Railway Company didn't receive parliamentary approval for the relevant tracks until 1844, and that stretch between Exeter and Plymouth didn't open until May 1846 — five years after the supposed delay.

The researchers couldn't track down Nature's original source material, but they did find the publisher's copy of the article bearing a handwritten annotation: "N. [J.] Holmes." That points to Nathaniel John Holmes, a prominent electrical engineer involved in laying early undersea telegraph cables across the North Sea. In 1871, Holmes lived roughly a mile from Nature's editor, Sir Norman Lockyer, in Hampstead. Newspaper archives also show Holmes delivering a lecture in Scotland on the chemical effects of the solar spectrum, and an 1877 letter from Holmes to Lockyer suggests the two had an ongoing professional relationship. Still, the researchers found no contemporary source for the story's more colorful details, including a claim that telegraph operators believed "someone was playing tricks with the instruments."

To pin down what actually happened, Wild's team turned to the earliest surviving magnetograms from the Greenwich magnetic observatory in London. Those records show no unusual geomagnetic activity on October 18, 1841, the date given in the Nature article. They do, however, show strong activity around October 18, 1848 — corroborated by contemporary newspaper reports and by sunspot observations recorded by British astronomer Temple Chevallier on October 19 of that year.

Railway timetables from the period offered further confirmation: a 10:05 p.m. express train ran from Exeter only between March 1848 and July 1849. The evidence points squarely to a single-digit transcription error — 1841 instead of 1848 — as the source of the confusion. With that account corrected, the earliest confirmed case of space weather disrupting technology becomes a March 1847 incident in which "spontaneous electrical currents" disrupted telegraph systems on England's Midland Railway during a "brilliant aurora."

"Space weather is often discussed as a modern challenge because of our dependence on technologies such as satellites, communications systems and electricity networks," Wild said. "What this study shows is that society has been experiencing the effects of space weather on technology for almost as long as electrical technologies have existed. The Exeter train delay is a fascinating story because it sits right at the point where emerging technologies first began to encounter the realities of the space environment."