3	“Hello? Is Anyone There?”

Up, up, up past the Russel Motel

Up, up, up to the Heavyside Layer

—T. S. Elliot, ca. 1937

It was a fantastic aurora–the best that anyone could recall in decades. When the September 18, 1941, Great Aurora took the stage, it was seen in Virginia, Denver, and St. Louis, but in New York City its displays played to a very mixed audience. From Central Park, at 9:30 P.M., pedestrians could plainly see several bright colored bands of light rivaling the full moon and spanning the sky in shades of orange, blue, and green. Curtains, rays, and flashing displays of light covered much of the sky throughout the rest of the night, giving New Yorkers a taste of what their northern relatives in Alaska see on a weekly schedule. The display had started before sunrise on Thursday, September 18, as thousands of commuters got up and had breakfast before dealing with another New York rush hour. This was a special day for other reasons as well. The Brooklyn Dodgers would be playing the Pittsburg Pirates, and Red Barber would be announcing the play-by-play activity over WOR radio. By 4:00 P.M., the baseball teams were tied 0–0 in a game that kept everyone at the edge of their seats, when suddenly, and for an interminable fifteen minutes, the broadcast was cut off by auroral interference. When the broadcast resumed, the Pirates had scored four runs, and Dodger fans pounded the radio station switchboards by the thousands, hurling oaths and bad language. The radio station tried to explain that they were absolutely blameless and that the fans should be cursing the auroral displays over their heads. Apparently, calm reasoning did little good. No one really bought the idea that solar storms had raided the game.

NBC, meanwhile, was busy trying to resolve their own problems. They were scheduled to do a special inaugural broadcast to Mexico to open twenty-three new affiliate stations. Although the program could be easily heard in the United States, in Mexico the auroral static and interference made the reception of the program impossible. Throughout most of Thursday, NBC and CBS shortwave transmissions were badly interrupted just about everywhere. RCA could no longer make connections with London directly, but they discovered that a new channel for their London broadcasts had opened up instead. By transmitting to Buenos Aires and then having the signal relayed to London from there, along a twelve-thousand-mile path, they could get a connection that was actually clearer than what they usually got along the direct route.

The next day, after dazzling aurora had washed the skies the evening before, New Yorkers were treated to a second not so amusing incident. At 11:45 A.M., WAAT in New Jersey was broadcasting recorded songs by Bing Crosby when a conversation between two men interfered with portions of the music. Station engineers worked frantically to clear up the cross-talk problem, but there wasn’t a whole lot they could do. Within a few minutes, the voices just as mysteriously disappeared, but not before callers from New Jersey complained by the hundreds on the station’s switchboards.

No sooner had this problem solved itself when the noon news broadcast was clobbered by a much louder conversation between two women. This time the discussion was about their blind dates, and the language they used was politely called “spicy” in newspaper accounts of the incident. Again, the auroral conditions overhead had mixed a shortwave channel with the normal broadcast at nearly the same frequency. Many callers complained about the change in programming, which was being heard by young children. There were even a number of men who called WAAT to ask about the women and whether the station were running a dating service.

Because the powerful electromagnetic forces that accompany auroras have a strong affinity for all things electrical, it is not surprising in retrospect that every communications technology we have come up with in the last 160 years has fallen victim to interference from these natural events. In this, our history of understanding aurora is intimately interwoven with the near simultaneous rise in understanding electricity and magnetism.

Electrical currents are actually just as magical as aurora in many of the ways that they work. For example, in 1820, Hans Oerstead, a physicist at the University of Copenhagen, could make electrical currents deflect compass needles. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, Michael Faraday uncovered an equally mysterious magnetic phenomenon: if you move a magnet across a wire, it causes a current to flow in the wire. It’s hard to imagine the excitement these investigators must have felt as they saw electrical currents produce invisible magnetic forces and vice versa. Faraday’s discovery of changing magnetic fields producing electrical currents, combined with Alexander von Humbolt’s discovery that sudden changes in the Earth’s magnetism can occur in “magnetic storms,” provided the ingredients for an interesting natural experiment; all that was needed was a network of wires large enough to catch nature in the act of inducing currents. The thirty-thousand-mile-long telegraph network available in 1848 provided just the right technology for the experiment, and during the next few years telegraphists caught much more than simply the dots and dashes they had bargained for. For a long time they had no clue what was going on in their wires.

During the aurora of November 17, 1848, the clicker of the telegraph connecting Florence and Pisa remained stuck as though it had become magnetized, even though the receiving apparatus was not in action at the time. This could only happen if an electric current from some outside source had flowed through the wires to energize the electromagnet. Telegraphers elsewhere began to notice that their lines mysteriously picked up large voltages that caused their equipment to chatter as well, with no signal being sent. Much of this was soon attributed to the long wires picking up lightning discharges in their vicinity, and the solution was simply to erect lighting rods on the telegraph poles. This solution seemed to work for some of the problems but failed to cure all of them. American telegraphists had only a short time to puzzle over atmospheric electricity on their one-thousand-mile lines when, in 1859, the Great Auroras of August 28 and September 4 blazed forth and lit up the skies of nearly every major city on the planet. It was one of the most remarkable displays ever seen in the United States up until that time, and its effects were simply wonderful.

These aurora were so exceptional that the American Journal of Science and Arts published no fewer than 158 accounts from around the world describing what the display looked like, the telegraphic disruptions they produced, and assorted theoretical speculations about what was causing them in the first place. Normal business transactions requiring telegraphic exchanges were completely shut down in the major world capitals. In France, telegraphic connections were disrupted as sparks literally flew from the ends of long transmission lines charged to thousands of volts. There were even some near electrocutions. In one instance, Fredrick Royce, a telegraph operator in Washington D.C., reported,

During the auroral display, I was calling Richmond, and had one hand on the iron plate. Happening to lean towards the sounder, which is against the wall, my forehead grazed a ground wire. Immediately I received a very severe electric shock, which stunned me for an instant. An old man who was sitting facing me, and but a few feet distant, said he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead to the shoulder.

While a silent battle was being waged between telegraphists and aurora, Alexander Graham Bell, in 1871, uttered the first telephonic sentence in his laboratory, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” In less than a year, Watson and Bell completed the first long-distance phone call between Cambridgeport and Boston, using borrowed telegraph lines. Meanwhile, as if to celebrate this event, the Great Aurora of February 4, 1872, colored the skies. Again, reports could be found in the newspapers and science journals of powerful voltages induced upon telegraph lines. During the November 17, 1882, Great Aurora, the telephone lines of the Metropolitan Telephone Company refused to work for most of the business day. Disruptions were also reported on the cables to Cuba and Mexico. The Chicago stock market was severely affected all day, as the business community suddenly discovered their vulnerability.

There was little that anyone could really do about this interference problem. By the time impacts were identified, it was already far too late to rethink deployment of the technology. The famous September 1859 storm lashed the Earth at a time when telegraphy had already become a transcontinental reality, displacing the Pony Express with thirty thousand miles of line strung up on trees and poles. Telephony was born nineteen years later, and its vulnerability was put to the test during the November 18, 1882, solar storm.

By 1901 there were over 855,000 telephones in service in the “Bell Telephone System.” It seemed as though the telephone industry had taken the country, and the world, by storm. Everyone wanted their own private line, and the only limiting factor to the spread of this technology was how quickly Bell could cut down trees to make telephone poles and wire city blocks or whole towns into the growing national circuitry. Today, the same public urgency exists in the cellular telephone market. Everyone wants their own cellular phone, and telecommunications companies can’t launch satellites or erect relay towers fast enough to keep up with the demand.

No sooner had some considerable money been spent on wiring the world for telegraph and telephone, but a still newer technology appeared in full bloom literally out of nowhere. Guglielmo Marconi in 1895 tinkered together the first spark gap radio wave transmitter and receiver in the garden of his father’s estate. The design for it was so simple, Marconi wondered why scientists hadn’t developed it themselves in their own laboratories, where all the parts were readily available. Instead of transmitting and receiving electrons flowing in a wire, it was the “wireless” emission of electromagnetic radiation by sparks that carried the messages. The spark intervals could send Morse Code signals as easily as through wire. By 1905, there were over one hundred wireless telegraph transmitters in the United States, with transmission ranges of five hundred miles. There were also some seven million telephones in service on the same wires that once carried telegraphic messages.

So what did people do with this new technology? Many people sure didn’t use it very responsibly. Unlike the telephone or telegraph where the ends of the lines are geographically known, for wireless broadcasts, everyone is anonymous unless they choose to identify themselves. As historian Edward Herron wrote in Miracle of the Air Waves: A History of Radio,

[Amateurs] thrilled to calls for help from sinking ships . . . and were not above creating synthetic excitement . . . sending out false messages that caused international distress, confusion, and waste of time and resources. . . . Commercial stations depending on the dollar revenue from the dots and dashes, were constantly at war with the amateurs who rode ruthlessly into the same wavelengths, causing havoc with the commercial messages.

This forerunner to modern computer “hacking” was the main reason why the U.S. government had to step in and put an end to the unruly amateur broadcasts in 1917. Once World War I had concluded in 1919, the embargo was lifted, and the pace of radio technology research exploded like champagne out of a bottle. Almost overnight, the technology for transmitting direct voice messages became a reality. The first commercial radio station, KDKA, owned by Westinghouse opened for business on November 2, 1920, to a hungry crowd of over 30,000 amateur wireless operators who had cobbled together their audio receivers as home hobbyists. Two years later, there were 1.5 million sets in use, and by the end of the decade there were radio sets in 7,500,000 homes. This phenomenon had taken eight years to escalate to this level, whereas telephone service had taken thirty-seven years to reach the same number of homes. Today’s stampede of people onto the Internet is only the most recent of many waves of colonization of new high-tech niches that have opened up during this century. Even today, with cell phones and the Internet, we still marvel at the breathtaking speed with which new communication technology becomes commonplace.

Most of the broadcasting during the 1920s was done at long wavelengths, but by 1925 the Navy got involved with shortwave broadcasting because it could be received over long distances with little interference. It could also be transmitted during the daytime, unlike the then popular long-wave transmissions. Wars are fought day and night, so there was tremendous pressure to push transmission technology to higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths where daytime “bounce” was possible. Ironically, the shortwave radio frequencies would drive communication into the very domain that made it a victim of solar interference. Now, whenever aurora dominated the sky, geomagnetic storms were brewing, or the Sun was throwing out flares like electromagnetic thunderbolts, their impacts would appear in many different guises and across the entire spectrum of communications technology. By the time Solar Cycle 17 began, in 1933, twenty-three million homes (70 percent of the total homes) had shortwave radio receivers, and Americans listened to nearly one billion hours each week of broadcasting. Television receivers operating in the newly conquered megacycle radio spectrum were already being field-tested by several manufacturers and were expected to be available to the consumer within a few years. Shortwave interruptions were an increasingly common annoyance during daytime broadcasting, but their origins in distant solar flares were not recognized until 1937.

Meanwhile, as communication technology evolved, the Sun continued to dazzle us with both beautiful aurora and a frustrating barrage of problems. The Great Auroras of January 1938, March 1940, and February 1956 were seen in Europe and as far south as Sicily. British citizens in 1938 were awestruck by the biggest display they had seen in fifty years and actually thought the intense red colors meant that London was aflame. While some viewers watched with dread as the aurora danced throughout Europe, crowds in Vienna awaiting the birth of Princess Juliana’s baby cheered the January aurora as a lucky omen. Catholics in the millions around the world were convinced that the January 1938 Great Aurora had been foretold by three young girls in Fatima, Portugal on October 13, 1917, in what many would later call a miraculous visitation by Mary, the mother of Jesus. The “lights in the sky” were to come soon before another major war, which in March 1938 began when the Nazis occupied Austria. The geomagnetic effects that accompanied the spectacular March 1940 aurora caused interruptions in millions of Easter Sunday calls to grandma between 10:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. Even the executive curator of the Hayden Planetarium, William Barton, had to go on a nationwide radio hookup to explain what was going on. According to the New York Times, the February 1956 Great Aurora included “one of the most intense blasts of cosmic rays ever recorded by scientists” up until that time, causing a spectacular red aurora in Alaska that colored the sky crimson. But while scientists and the public were being entertained aboveground, a far more serious chain of events was unfolding beneath the sea. A full-scale naval alarm had been raised for a British submarine, which was thought to have disappeared. The Acheron had been expected to report her position at 5:05 EST while on arctic patrol. When it failed to do so, emergency rescue preparations were begun. Ships and planes began the grim task of searching the deadly, ice cold waters between Iceland and Greenland, but no trace of flotsam or jetsam from the submarine was ever seen. Then, as the auroral activity began to subside, the “missing” submarine turned up four hours later when its transmissions were again picked up.

Military interests in space weather conditions also came into conjunction with one of the most celebrated events in the history of the twentieth century: D day. No expense was spared to make certain the Allied invasion didn’t also coincide with a shortwave blackout from an errant solar flare. Walter Orr Roberts, from his solar observatory above Fremont Pass in Colorado, would file daily “Top Secret” reports on the Sun’s current activity. Thousands of miles away, military planners scrutinized these brief missives to make sure the timing of the invasion was “just right” and in a slot, free of any possible solar mischief. His lifelong studies of the Sun, however, eventually led to his death in 1990 from melanoma at age seventy-four. From his mountaintop observatory ultraviolet rays bathed him and planted the hidden seeds that later consumed him, but not before he had founded the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

The February 10, 1958, Great Aurora painted the skies over Chicago and Boston in vivid reds and greens, following close behind a terrible snow storm in upstate New York and another Redstone rocket launched by the U.S. Army. In a foretaste of what would become a common, and expensive, problem decades later, the Explorer 1 satellite launched two weeks before the aurora suddenly lost its primary radio system. The geomagnetic activity also knocked out telecommunications circuits all across Canada, and, although it was not visible in the New York area, it was so brilliant over Europe that it aroused centuries-old fears that some kind of battle or catastrophe was in progress. The Monday storm cut off the United States from radio contact with the rest of the world, following an afternoon of “jumpy connections” that ended with a complete radio blackout by 3:00 P.M., although contact with South America seemed unaffected. By evening the conditions had not improved, and radio messages to Europe could only occasionally be sent and received.

Radio and TV viewers in the Boston area, however, were also having their own amusing problems. For three hours, they fiddled with their TVs and radios as their sets went haywire, at times blanking out entirely or changing stations erratically. Channel 7 viewers began getting channel 7 broadcasts from Manchester, Vermont, while channel 4 viewers received ghostly blends of the local Boston station and one in Providence, Rhode Island. On this Monday evening, families had put their children to bed and were wrapping up their evening’s activities with the Lawrence Welk Show at 9:30 P.M.. Others were waiting to watch a nationally broadcast TV movie, Meeting in Paris, on channel 4, or listen to a boxing match. What they hadn’t counted on was that they would get to do both at the same time. Jane Greer played the ex-wife who asks her former spouse, played by Rory Calhoon, to smuggle her new husband out of France. Instead, they discover “that the old spark of romance is still alive when they have a strange encounter in Paris.” During a passionate love scene, the audio portion of the movie was replaced by the blow-by-blow details of a boxing match:

Smith gave him a left to the jaw and a short right hook to the button.

But darling we love each other so much.

A left hook to the jaw flattened Smith and he’s down for the count.

Kiss me again, my sweet.

Whenever major aurora took the skies, newspapers seemed to enjoy announcing the many problems they could create, and, before 1960, they usually put the news on the front page. Television was still very new, and most people had little idea what to expect from it in terms of clarity or reliability. Today, as the news media suffer from information overload, we seldom hear of telephone or shortwave interruptions making any impact on us, at least not the way they used to. But that doesn’t mean the underlying problems have gone away. Aurora are in most instances only a poor indicator of other invisible events taking place within the magnetic region surrounding the Earth–the magnetosphere. Some of these disturbances can even affect our technology without producing an aurora at all. In nearly all such geomagnetic storms, some aspect of our technology is affected. In fact, “solar storms” are now seen as a problem for many of the key systems in our technological infrastructure. One of these is as close to you as the light switch on your wall.