THE CARRINGTON EVENT

See Also: BREWING, DISAPPEARED OR RELOCATED; SIR ISAAC NEWTON

Richard Carrington was born into a family of London brewers. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge. During his course he became fascinated by astronomy. He formed the view that mathematical laws could be used to describe celestial phenomena. Subsequently, with the support of his father, he built a private observatory at Redhill in Surrey. There, he engaged in a programme of recording circumpolar stars down to the tenth magnitude. The results were issued as The Redhill Catalogue (1857). It was a work that was held to be solid rather than innovative. The Admiralty, which had sponsored the publication of the reference work, had an ambivalent view about the actual value of the research.

At the close of the 18^thC William Herschel had studied sunspots. He had sought to find some correlation between them and the Earth's weather. He had been able to find what he took to be one in the records of the cost of wheat in London. He formulated a hypothesis that if there had been a lot of sunspot activity then there had been bad weather and the commodity's price had risen as a result. He had made this apparent correlation known in two papers that he had delivered to meetings of the Royal Society in 1801. They had been published in the body's Philosophical Transactions. The contention had not been taken up by his contemporaries and had been the subject of a degree of derision. In brewing, grain was one of the two principal ingredients. Therefore, Carrington, as the son of a brewer, may have had a degree of interest in the musician's work and reasoning that was non-astronomical.

Heinrich Schwabe, a German, had engaged in a programme of sunspot observations over the years 1826 to 1843. This had revealed a cycle of variation that operated upon a ten-to-eleven-year cycle. In 1852 Edward Sabine, an Anglo-Irishman, had announced that this phenomenon was paralleled by the Earth's geomagnetic activity. Four years prior to the Catalogue s publication, Carrington had launched his own series of sunspot observations. In 1858, following the death of his father, he assumed the management of the family brewery in Brentford.

On 1 September 1859 Carrington observed a vast solar flare. He wrote an account of what he had witnessed. He was the first person to do so. Hours later much of the world was subject to a magnetic storm. It was so intense that there were numerous instances of telegraphic equipment bursting into flame. The episode was to become known as the Carrington Event.

The following year the astronomer-brewer was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. His new found status was underscored by the fact that it was the Society that sponsored the publication of Observations of The Spots On The Sun From November 9, 1853, To March 24, 1861, Made At Redhill (1863).

Carrington s final years contained a high degree of melodrama. He married Rosa Jefferies, a beautiful, far younger, illiterate woman. Subsequently, her former lover almost killed her with a knife. The man was convicted of the assault and given a twenty-year-long prison sentence.

Location: The Royal Brewery, 23 High Street, Brentford, TW8 0JD

David Backhouse 2024