Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Lancaster-led reanalysis redates the Exeter telegraph delay to October 1848
The railway line in the story did not open until 1846, so a team led by Lancaster University went back to timetables, newspapers and magnetic records and moved the 16-minute delay to 18 October 1848.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The account under review has the 10:05 p.m. train out of Exeter held 16 minutes while a "very intense magnetic disturbance" interfered with the telegraph used to check whether the line ahead was clear.
- The team found that the railway line named in the account did not open until 1846, almost five years after the 1841 date the story had always carried.
- To find the real date they combined railway timetables, historical newspapers, solar observations, auroral reports and digitized geomagnetic records.
- They identified a strong geomagnetic disturbance on 18 October 1848, with sunspots and auroras reported across the UK and Europe, and read the printed 1841 as a typographical error.
- That leaves the earliest credible case of space weather disrupting technology as telegraph interference on the Midland Railway in March 1847.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint One of the most quoted entries in the pre-1850 storm record carried the wrong year for about 155 years, so early entries in that record need an archive check before anyone uses them to bound how often severe storms recur.
- capability Records that were never collected as science, timetables and local newspapers among them, can settle dates that magnetic traces alone leave open, which widens what counts as usable evidence for storms that predate standardised instruments.
- decision Anyone who cites Exeter as the opening case of technology meeting space weather now has to cite it as one of the earliest instead, and with a different year attached.
The correction leaves the cause where the Victorian account put it and changes when it happened. An influential 1871 article in Nature dated the delay to 18 October 1841 [4]. The reanalysis keeps the day and the month and moves the year forward by seven [13].
Jim Wild, a professor at Lancaster University, led the work, with colleagues from the British Geological Survey, Natural Resources Canada, Baylor University, RMIT University and STFC RAL Space [10]. The first practical electric telegraph networks were deployed during the 1840s, and as solar activity rose over the following years, operators started reporting electrical effects they could not explain [11].
Mike Hapgood, a visiting scientist at STFC's RAL Space, said the study "highlights the importance of preserving these older records, which give us the evidence base we need to interpret past events and strengthen future predictions" [9]. The date matters for risk work. An event filed under the wrong year cannot be checked against the sunspot counts and auroral sightings of the year it actually occurred in, and it cannot be counted toward how often storms of a given size recur.
I would like to see the paper's own numbers. The published account of the study does not give a size for the 18 October 1848 disturbance, describing it only as strong [6]. That makes the redated event a confirmed hit on Victorian signalling equipment that extreme-event estimates cannot yet use as a calibrated point in the severe tail.
Wild said that "society has been experiencing the effects of space weather on technology for almost as long as electrical technologies have existed" [12]. He also noted that the event "remains one of the first clear examples of solar activity disrupting critical infrastructure" [8]. Railways and other critical infrastructure are still exposed, through power systems, signalling equipment, satellite navigation and communications networks [15].
What to watch
- An amplitude for the 18 October 1848 disturbance in the Space Weather paper itself would show whether the event belongs in the severe tail used for extreme-value estimates.
- Whether the March 1847 Midland Railway report survives the same archive cross-check that unseated the Exeter date.
- Whether other pre-1850 entries in space weather chronologies trace back to the same 1871 Nature article.