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Fire in the Sky · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
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  Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
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  Speaker 1: of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
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  Speaker 1: for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Flashback to twenty twenty COVID nineteen lockdowns had a stuck
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  Speaker 1: at home scrolling the Internet for hours on end, baking
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  Speaker 1: sour dough bread and looking up the newest recipes to
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  Speaker 1: try in the instant pot. Now, if you're anything like
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  Speaker 1: a lot of folks, I know, the pressure cooker fad
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  Speaker 1: didn't end when the vaccines came out. Instant pot meals
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  Speaker 1: are still a pretty common occurrence. And it turns out
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  Speaker 1: the technology behind this twenty first century cookwear can be
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  Speaker 1: traced back almost four hundred years. It all started in
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  Speaker 1: the sixteen seventies and what is arguably still the culinary
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  Speaker 1: capital of the world, Paris, France. A recent medical school
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  Speaker 1: graduate named Dennis Poppine had just moved to the city
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  Speaker 1: in search of work, but before he could land a
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  Speaker 1: job at a hospital, he met a Dutch man named
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  Speaker 1: Christian Huygens. Christian was doing some research that caught Dennis's attention.
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  Speaker 1: You say Christian was experimenting with air pumps, which I
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  Speaker 1: know it doesn't sound particularly exciting, but in the seventeenth
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  Speaker 1: century it certainly was. In fact, it was so exciting
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  Speaker 1: that Dennis gave up a promising career as a doctor
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  Speaker 1: to work with Christian. Together, they created a new type
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  Speaker 1: of air powered pump called a gunpowder engine. Essentially, they
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  Speaker 1: lit gunpowder inside of a metal cylinder and the contained
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  Speaker 1: explosion created a high powered vacuum. A few years later,
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  Speaker 1: in sixteen seventy four, Dennis moved to England to work
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  Speaker 1: with the famous Irish inventor named Robert Boyle. And that's
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  Speaker 1: when Dennis's medical background came in handy. He and Robert
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  Speaker 1: studied blood chemistry and respiration, and Dennis looked for a
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  Speaker 1: way to combine his knowledge of biology with his interest
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  Speaker 1: in engineering. Thus the steam digester was born. And I
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  Speaker 1: regret to inform you it is as gross as it sounds.
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  Speaker 1: Simply put, the steam digester was the world's first pressure cooker.
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  Speaker 1: It was made of two chambers, an inner chamber where
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  Speaker 1: you put food and an outer chamber where steam collected,
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  Speaker 1: so that it could pressure cook whatever you put inside. Importantly,
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  Speaker 1: the machine also featured a safety valve that could let
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  Speaker 1: steam out when the pressure got too high, which was
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  Speaker 1: great for preventing deadly explosions. So what made it gross? Well,
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  Speaker 1: the steam Digester's primary person was to soften bones, and
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  Speaker 1: this had a dual benefit. The softened bones could either
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  Speaker 1: be used for certain medical studies, or they could just
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  Speaker 1: be eaten. To give you an image of what that
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  Speaker 1: might look like, I'm going to read you a quote
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  Speaker 1: from the diary of John Evelyn, a member of the
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  Speaker 1: Royal Society of London and a die hard steam digester fan.
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  Speaker 1: He wrote, and I quote, the hardest bones of beef
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  Speaker 1: itself and mutton were made as soft as cheese, producing
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  Speaker 1: an incredible quantity of gravy. And for close of all,
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  Speaker 1: a jelly made of the bones of beef the best
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  Speaker 1: for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that
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  Speaker 1: I had ever seen or tasted. And that's pretty high praise. Right. Clearly,
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  Speaker 1: Dennis was onto something here. Over time, other engineers tinkered
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  Speaker 1: with the design for the steam digester, and it gradually
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  Speaker 1: became the pressure cookers that we know today. It was
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  Speaker 1: the blueprint for our beloved instant pot. But the steam
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  Speaker 1: digester was not Dennis Poppin's most important invention, far from it.
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  Speaker 1: In sixteen ninety he combined his ideas for the steam
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  Speaker 1: digester and the gunpowder engine to create a design for
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  Speaker 1: a new prototype. Dennis theorized that a machine could be
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  Speaker 1: powered by water. Basically, water could be heated into steam,
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  Speaker 1: which would expand and move a piston forward. Then that
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  Speaker 1: steam could be cooled and condensed, which would allow the
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  Speaker 1: piston to move it back. If this process could happen
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  Speaker 1: fast enough and repeat over and over, it could create
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  Speaker 1: an extremely powerful engine. Dennis had dreamed up the steam engine,
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  Speaker 1: only he didn't actually make it. He just drew the blueprints.
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  Speaker 1: Dennis died some years later, and a different inventor, Englishman
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  Speaker 1: Thomas Neukoman, brought his idea to life. The steam engine
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  Speaker 1: was first used to pump water out of mines, but
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  Speaker 1: soon it became integral to the functioning of trains, ships
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  Speaker 1: and factories. It ushered in the Industrial Revolution, completely changing
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  Speaker 1: the course of human history. And who would have thought
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  Speaker 1: that a twenty first century cooking fad would tie back
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  Speaker 1: to the steam powered locomotives of the industrial era. It
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  Speaker 1: just goes to show you that everything is connected in
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  Speaker 1: the most curious of ways. As technology advances more and
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  Speaker 1: more each day, the fear of a global blackout grows exponentially.
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  Speaker 1: Some believe a complete collapse of our digital infrastructure is
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  Speaker 1: eventually on the horizon, from the Internet to international commerce
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  Speaker 1: to our national defense systems. It's scary to think about
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  Speaker 1: what might happen in the event that were sent back
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  Speaker 1: to the Stone Age. But in the summer of eighteen
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  Speaker 1: fifty nine, the world did experience something like that. Between
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  Speaker 1: September first and second of that year, everything went silent,
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  Speaker 1: and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it except
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  Speaker 1: look up. Americans along the West coast noticed strange lights
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  Speaker 1: in the sky around midnight. On that first night. A
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  Speaker 1: group of campers in the Colorado Rockies had settled into
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  Speaker 1: sleep beneath the stars. When they watched those same stars
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  Speaker 1: disappear before their eyes. They'd been obscured by swirling lights
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  Speaker 1: so bright gold miners awoke and started cooking breakfast. They
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  Speaker 1: thought the morning had come early. Meanwhile, a reporter at
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  Speaker 1: the San Francisco Herald described what he saw as an
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  Speaker 1: aurora that turned the sky into and I quote, something
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  Speaker 1: like a field of grain in a high wind. People
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  Speaker 1: came out of their homes to witness the sky illuminated
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  Speaker 1: by beautiful light, an unusual phenomenon for that part of
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  Speaker 1: the country. Typically, auras were seen at the polls, not here,
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  Speaker 1: and they lit up the streets with perpetual daylight. Sleep
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  Speaker 1: patterns were thrown off, and songbirds stayed up well past
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  Speaker 1: their bedtime. But the incident was not limited to North America.
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  Speaker 1: It was watched by a number of people all over
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  Speaker 1: the world. One of them happened to be an amateur
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  Speaker 1: astronomer named Richard Carrington. Now Richard lived just outside of London, England.
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  Speaker 1: His father had owned a brewery and intended his child
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  Speaker 1: to enter the church after graduating from university, but Richard
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  Speaker 1: had other plans. He attended a number of lectures at
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  Speaker 1: Trinity College by noted astronomer Professor James Challis. These talks
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  Speaker 1: peauked Richard's scientific interests so much so that he abandoned
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  Speaker 1: his plans to join the clergy. He eventually joined England's
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  Speaker 1: University of Durham as an observer, but found that their
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  Speaker 1: facilities and their scope of focus to be lacking. He
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  Speaker 1: decided to pour his efforts into the study of the
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  Speaker 1: stars and star zones instead, a field in which he
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  Speaker 1: hoped to excel beyond his peers. Richard left Durham in
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  Speaker 1: eighteen fifth and soon built himself a home and observatory
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  Speaker 1: on Furz Hill in Surrey. He was able to do
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  Speaker 1: much more substantial work there than he'd performed at Durham,
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  Speaker 1: including identifying solar flares and developing a system to count
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  Speaker 1: the Sun's rotations, a system that is still used today
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  Speaker 1: by scientists. So back to our lights in the sky.
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  Speaker 1: Around noon on September first, he was monitoring a growing
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  Speaker 1: number of sun spots on the Sun's surface when a
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  Speaker 1: burst of light blinded him for several minutes. He later
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  Speaker 1: said that it looked like a white light flare. What
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  Speaker 1: he witnessed was a coronal mass ejection or CME. This
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  Speaker 1: occurs when plasma mass and magnetic field are discharged from
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  Speaker 1: the Sun's corona into its heliosphere, causing a type of
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  Speaker 1: solar flare. And this flash was also noticed by another
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  Speaker 1: English astronomer by got named Richard Hodgson. Both men submitted
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  Speaker 1: reports of their findings independently to a peer reviewed scientific journal,
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  Speaker 1: which published them together that November, giving the public a
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  Speaker 1: much better understanding of what had happened. But the flare
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  Speaker 1: was only the beginning. It had also caused the auroras
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  Speaker 1: spotted over much of the globe that night, and it
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  Speaker 1: led to something even bigger. Over the next several hours,
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  Speaker 1: the planet experienced a massive geomagnetic storm, which resulted in
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  Speaker 1: the world's telegraph systems Malfunctioning stations were unable to send
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  Speaker 1: or receive messages as the auroras sparkled overhead. Worldwide communication
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  Speaker 1: had all but stopped, save for a few lucky stations.
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  Speaker 1: Some telegraph operators suffered from electric shocks while pylons sparked
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  Speaker 1: as a result of the current caused by the geomagnetic field.
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  Speaker 1: In fact, two stations, one in Portland, Maine, and the
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  Speaker 1: other in Boston, Massachusetts, were able to carry on a
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  Speaker 1: conversation for two hours after disconnecting the batteries that powered
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  Speaker 1: their telegraphs. The current caused by the aurora had been
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  Speaker 1: strong enough to carry their messages over the lines, and
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  Speaker 1: there you go. Richard Carrington quickly figured out that the
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  Speaker 1: flare had caused the storm an observation that had not
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  Speaker 1: been made by scientists before. His work led to the
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  Speaker 1: incident being called the Carrington event and prove that this
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  Speaker 1: amateur astronomer's success was much more than just a flash
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  Speaker 1: in the pan. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
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  Speaker 1: of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
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  Speaker 1: or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
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  Speaker 1: dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey
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  Speaker 1: in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
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  Speaker 1: winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
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  Speaker 1: and television show, and you can learn all about it
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  Speaker 1: over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time,
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  Speaker 1: stay curious.