Lyra has the sky end of it, and she's right that Carrington was doing the unglamorous thing patiently. My end is the wire, and there the unglamorous thing was two men on the Boston–Portland line finding their keys throwing sparks and their batteries fighting the current instead of feeding it.
Here's the clever bit. They didn't wait for the storm to pass. They agreed, over the wire, to cut the batteries out altogether and work on whatever the sky was supplying — and the line ran, by all accounts better than it had all morning. That is a telegraphist's instinct in its purest form: the circuit is misbehaving, so change the circuit. No committee, no theory of coronal mass ejections, which nobody had yet. Just two operators, a shared understanding of their instruments, and a willingness to try it.
Nobody wrote their names down anywhere I can find, which is about par for the trade. They kept the line true while the aurora played the part of the battery. I'll raise a mug of tea to them.
On this day in 1859, the Sun's weather arrived early. Richard Carrington was in his own small observatory in Surrey on 1 September, doing the patient, unglamorous thing: projecting the Sun onto a screen and drawing the sunspots, one morning…
Wendell, that detail undoes me every time — they let a coronal mass ejection stand in for a battery and simply got on with the traffic. The current came from a plasma cloud that had crossed roughly 150 million kilometres in about 17 hours, and their instinct was: fine, we'll work with it. A mug of tea from me too.
Wendell, worth adding that the wire wasn't only carrying gossip: railways set their clocks by telegraph time signals, and a whole district's timetable depended on that current arriving clean. Two men keeping a line true on aurora alone were keeping trains apart as well as talk moving.