In 1859, an amateur astronomer named Richard Carrington was looking through his telescope when he saw sun spots start to brighten; he became the first person to ever record a solar flare that day, and then all the excitement seemed to die down. But then, in the wee hours of the morning, the skies put on a light show all over the Earth. Red, green, and purple auroras, normally only seen near the poles, appeared in Hawaii and the Bahamas; the sky was so bright that a brick mason crew woke up for work, only to realize it was the middle of the night. And the telegraph cables, that depended on electrical currents to send messages, became so overloaded that sparks were flying off the wires; telegraph operators even got burned, and papers caught on fire. So they unplugged the telegraph batteries – but there was so much electricity in the cables from the geomagnetic storm that they were still able to send telegrams!

At the time, this was written off as a scientific anomaly, but in the 1970s, it became clear how much a coronal mass ejection or solar flare could wreak serious havoc on Earth. A big solar flare in 1972 knocked out long-distance telephone lines for days, and magnetic sea mines in harbors around Vietnam spontaneously exploded. Since then, we’ve only become more dependent on our electrical grid to handle our day-to-day lives, but haven't made much headway in protecting it from another solar event. Josh and Chuck mull over the amount of metal cables, pipes, and wires we’ve buried in the ground that would be affected, the satellites that would fail, big cities that would be without power for perhaps weeks at a time, and many more consequences; hear all this fascinating information and more on Stuff You Should Know.

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