In addition, the authors also found contemporary newspaper reports about Holmes giving a lecture in Scotland on the chemical effects of the solar spectrum. So Holmes was clearly interested in solar activity and was familiar with Lockyer’s discovery of helium lines in solar spectra. There is also a letter from Holmes in 1877 in which he invites Lockyer to visit and suggests that there was some business relationship between them.
This still did not explain the discrepancy between the reported 1841 Exeter train delay date and historical records. “No citation is presented that would enable an investigation into the veracity of the statement,” said Wild et al. wrote. “The remarkable claim that [the operators] “The next morning reported that someone was playing a prank with the instruments.” Evidence suggests that this report may have come from a contemporary newspaper report or similar, but we could not find any report that contained this phrase or any wording to it.”
Wild and his co-authors next turned to the scientific archival records, particularly the earliest magnetograms recorded at the Greenwich Magnetic Observatory in London. As early as 1840, there are records of “extraordinary” observations of a magnetic field indicating strong geomagnetic storms, but no unusual activity such as auroras was reported in England on October 18, 1841 Was strong geomagnetic activity around October 18, 1848, confirmed by contemporary newspaper reports and by sunspot observations by the British astronomer Temple Chevallier on October 19, 1848.
As Wild et al. When they consulted contemporary railway timetables, they found evidence of a 10:05 p.m. express train departing from Exeter between March 11, 1848 and July 26, 1849. They suspect that the original date of 1841 mentioned in the Nature newspaper was a typo and that the event occurred but the year was incorrect. Since the 1841 report is excluded, the earliest documented example of space weather affecting technology is an incident in March 1847 in which “spontaneous electrical currents” disrupted the Midland Railway’s telegraph systems as a “bright aurora” shone across the British Isles.
Space Weather, 2026. DOI: 10.1029/2026SW005239 (About DOIs).
