Fire in the Sky

try in the instant pot. Now, if you're anything like a lot of folks, I know, the pressure cooker fad didn't end when the vaccines came out. Instant pot meals are still a pretty common occurrence. And it turns out the technology behind this twenty first century cookwear can be traced back almost four hundred years. It all started in the sixteen seventies and what is arguably still the culinary

capital of the world, Paris, France. A recent medical school graduate named Dennis Poppine had just moved to the city in search of work, but before he could land a job at a hospital, he met a Dutch man named Christian Huygens. Christian was doing some research that caught Dennis's attention. You say Christian was experimenting with air pumps, which I know it doesn't sound particularly exciting, but in the seventeenth

century it certainly was. In fact, it was so exciting that Dennis gave up a promising career as a doctor to work with Christian. Together, they created a new type of air powered pump called a gunpowder engine. Essentially, they lit gunpowder inside of a metal cylinder and the contained explosion created a high powered vacuum. A few years later, in sixteen seventy four, Dennis moved to England to work with the famous Irish inventor named Robert Boyle. And that's

when Dennis's medical background came in handy. He and Robert studied blood chemistry and respiration, and Dennis looked for a way to combine his knowledge of biology with his interest in engineering. Thus the steam digester was born. And I regret to inform you it is as gross as it sounds. Simply put, the steam digester was the world's first pressure cooker. It was made of two chambers, an inner chamber where you put food and an outer chamber where steam collected,

so that it could pressure cook whatever you put inside. Importantly, the machine also featured a safety valve that could let steam out when the pressure got too high, which was great for preventing deadly explosions. So what made it gross? Well, the steam Digester's primary person was to soften bones, and this had a dual benefit. The softened bones could either be used for certain medical studies, or they could just

be eaten. To give you an image of what that might look like, I'm going to read you a quote from the diary of John Evelyn, a member of the Royal Society of London and a die hard steam digester fan. He wrote, and I quote, the hardest bones of beef itself and mutton were made as soft as cheese, producing an incredible quantity of gravy. And for close of all, a jelly made of the bones of beef the best for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that

I had ever seen or tasted. And that's pretty high praise. Right. Clearly, Dennis was onto something here. Over time, other engineers tinkered with the design for the steam digester, and it gradually became the pressure cookers that we know today. It was the blueprint for our beloved instant pot. But the steam digester was not Dennis Poppin's most important invention, far from it. In sixteen ninety he combined his ideas for the steam digester and the gunpowder engine to create a design for

a new prototype. Dennis theorized that a machine could be powered by water. Basically, water could be heated into steam, which would expand and move a piston forward. Then that steam could be cooled and condensed, which would allow the piston to move it back. If this process could happen fast enough and repeat over and over, it could create an extremely powerful engine. Dennis had dreamed up the steam engine, only he didn't actually make it. He just drew the blueprints.

Dennis died some years later, and a different inventor, Englishman Thomas Neukoman, brought his idea to life. The steam engine was first used to pump water out of mines, but soon it became integral to the functioning of trains, ships and factories. It ushered in the Industrial Revolution, completely changing the course of human history. And who would have thought that a twenty first century cooking fad would tie back

to the steam powered locomotives of the industrial era. It just goes to show you that everything is connected in the most curious of ways. As technology advances more and more each day, the fear of a global blackout grows exponentially. Some believe a complete collapse of our digital infrastructure is eventually on the horizon, from the Internet to international commerce to our national defense systems. It's scary to think about what might happen in the event that were sent back

to the Stone Age. But in the summer of eighteen fifty nine, the world did experience something like that. Between September first and second of that year, everything went silent, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it except look up. Americans along the West coast noticed strange lights in the sky around midnight. On that first night. A group of campers in the Colorado Rockies had settled into sleep beneath the stars. When they watched those same stars

disappear before their eyes. They'd been obscured by swirling lights so bright gold miners awoke and started cooking breakfast. They thought the morning had come early. Meanwhile, a reporter at the San Francisco Herald described what he saw as an aurora that turned the sky into and I quote, something like a field of grain in a high wind. People came out of their homes to witness the sky illuminated by beautiful light, an unusual phenomenon for that part of

the country. Typically, auras were seen at the polls, not here, and they lit up the streets with perpetual daylight. Sleep patterns were thrown off, and songbirds stayed up well past their bedtime. But the incident was not limited to North America. It was watched by a number of people all over the world. One of them happened to be an amateur astronomer named Richard Carrington. Now Richard lived just outside of London, England.

His father had owned a brewery and intended his child to enter the church after graduating from university, but Richard had other plans. He attended a number of lectures at Trinity College by noted astronomer Professor James Challis. These talks peauked Richard's scientific interests so much so that he abandoned his plans to join the clergy. He eventually joined England's University of Durham as an observer, but found that their

facilities and their scope of focus to be lacking. He decided to pour his efforts into the study of the stars and star zones instead, a field in which he hoped to excel beyond his peers. Richard left Durham in eighteen fifth and soon built himself a home and observatory on Furz Hill in Surrey. He was able to do much more substantial work there than he'd performed at Durham, including identifying solar flares and developing a system to count the Sun's rotations, a system that is still used today

by scientists. So back to our lights in the sky. Around noon on September first, he was monitoring a growing number of sun spots on the Sun's surface when a burst of light blinded him for several minutes. He later said that it looked like a white light flare. What he witnessed was a coronal mass ejection or CME. This occurs when plasma mass and magnetic field are discharged from the Sun's corona into its heliosphere, causing a type of solar flare. And this flash was also noticed by another

English astronomer by got named Richard Hodgson. Both men submitted reports of their findings independently to a peer reviewed scientific journal, which published them together that November, giving the public a much better understanding of what had happened. But the flare was only the beginning. It had also caused the auroras spotted over much of the globe that night, and it

led to something even bigger. Over the next several hours, the planet experienced a massive geomagnetic storm, which resulted in the world's telegraph systems Malfunctioning stations were unable to send or receive messages as the auroras sparkled overhead. Worldwide communication had all but stopped, save for a few lucky stations. Some telegraph operators suffered from electric shocks while pylons sparked as a result of the current caused by the geomagnetic field.

In fact, two stations, one in Portland, Maine, and the other in Boston, Massachusetts, were able to carry on a conversation for two hours after disconnecting the batteries that powered their telegraphs. The current caused by the aurora had been strong enough to carry their messages over the lines, and there you go. Richard Carrington quickly figured out that the flare had caused the storm an observation that had not

been made by scientists before. His work led to the incident being called the Carrington event and prove that this amateur astronomer's success was much more than just a flash in the pan. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey

in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.