Richard Christopher Carrington
Richard Christopher Carrington was studying the sun one day when he saw a solar flare come off of the sun towards earth. Within a time span of a few days all of the telegraph lines and any kind of working electronic system was down. An EMP had struck Earth (ElectroMagnetic Pulse), The EMP created a voltage in the wires, the longer the wire the larger the voltage, when the voltage went to ground it started fires in the telegraph offices. Nobody knew what had truly happened until it was explained. Carrington had seen, recorded, and discovered the first recorded solar flare. Richard Carrington was born May 26th, 1826 in Chelsea, England. Son of a rich brewer he was expected to work in a church. In 1844 he started his studies in theology at the Trinity College of Cambridge, graduating in 1848. By that time he had found his enjoyment in astronomy. In 1849 he joined the Durham University Observatory, but left this job in March 1852. He used his family fortune to build his own house and observatory at Red hill, Surrey. There, he worked in both day time solar and night time astronomical observation time. The death of his father in 1858 forced him to take over the family business. He was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1851, in which he served as secretary from 1857 -1862 and to the Royal Society in 1850. In 1865, he became ill, he sold the family brewery and retired to an isolated spot at Churt, Surrey, where he established a new observatory, but never really committed to serious astronomical work. He died there November 27, 1875, he was 49. Although his work on asteroids and planets while at Durham Observatory was enough to earn a membership in the Royal Astronomical Society. Carrington's first major was of his Catalogue of 3735 Circumpolar Stars. Published in 1857, Carrington's Catalogue was extremely liked and earned him the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1859. Carrington is however mostly remembered for his work on sunspots. Impressed by Heinrich Schwabe’s 1843 discovery of the sunspot cycle, and appalled by the lack of systematic sunspot observations, Carrington took it upon himself to pick up the subject where Schwabe had left it. Improving on Schwabe's drawing method, Carrington drew and recorded the positions of sunspots from 1853 to 1861. He failed to cover a full sunspot cycle as intended, he nonetheless discovered various other things; the discovery of the Sun's differential rotation, the equator-ward migration of spots in the course of the cycle, the determination of the Sun's rotation axis with an accuracy, and the first observation of a white light flare. By the time Carrington published his massive 1863 sunspot book, titled Observations of the Spots on the Sun, he was already recognized worldwide about his sunspot observations. He did extensive research with sunspot observers across Europe, including Heinrich Schwabe and Rudolf Wolf. When Schwabe was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 1857, Carrington personally delivered the medal to the German astronomer. Despites these successes,