A magnetic storm long thought to have delayed a train in Victorian England almost certainly did so seven years later than the record states, according to a new study.
The original account appeared anonymously in Nature in 1871. It described a "very intense magnetic disturbance" on 18 October 1841 that interfered with railway signals in Exeter and delayed the scheduled 10:05 p.m. departure by 16 minutes.
The new work, led by Professor Jim Wild of Lancaster University, concludes that the event happened on 18 October 1848. It is published in the American Geophysical Union journal Space Weather under the title "Did Space Weather Delay the 10:05 p.m. Train Departure From Exeter on 18 October 1841?"
The flaw in the old date is structural. The Exeter-to-Starcross railway line named in the 1871 account did not open until 1846, about five years after the event it is supposed to have disrupted.
To find the real date, the researchers compared railway timetables and newspaper reports with solar activity observations, accounts of the aurora and digitised magnetic field measurements. All of them pointed to 1848.
The correction costs the Exeter delay its place in the record books. Had 1841 been right, it would have been the earliest known case of space weather disrupting human technology. That distinction now belongs to a telegraph interference incident on Britain's Midland Railway in March 1847.
"We effectively investigated what had to be a typo in a Nature paper from 1871," said Brett Carter, an associate professor and space weather researcher at RMIT University, adding that "the 1840s mark the intersection between the rise of our technological age and space weather".
The decade matters because it sits just before the Carrington Event of 1859, the benchmark solar storm of the nineteenth century. Wild said the work showed that space weather "is not a new threat but a long-standing natural hazard", a point with practical weight given a new solar cycle expected in the 2030s. Mike Hapgood, a visiting scientist at RAL Space, said: "It highlights the importance of preserving these older records."
The paper was written by six authors drawn from six institutions in four countries, including the British Geological Survey, Natural Resources Canada and Baylor University. The material was provided by RMIT University.
The finding should be stated with care, because what has been corrected is the date and not the delay. The 10:05 from Exeter remains 16 minutes late. It is now late in 1848.
This is a net improvement to the line's punctuality in 1841, a year in which the service departed exactly on time, having not yet departed at all.
The Department of Unnecessary Research regards the result as the most thorough late-running inquiry ever conducted: six authors, six institutions, four countries, digitised magnetic records, newspaper archives and the position of the Sun, producing a 16-minute delay that has been moved rather than removed.
Operators may wish to note the precedent. A delay correctly attributed to the Sun is not thereby shortened, and a delay whose decade has been corrected is not thereby excused. The passengers are owed the same sixteen minutes and are merely owed them later.
Space weather science has consequently advanced to the point where it can tell the 1840s, with confidence, which evening to have been inconvenienced on.