Thirty five years ago, on March 13, 1989, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation National News reported “Early this morning six million people across Quebec woke up to darkness and disbelief…the entire province had been hit by a power failure." The people of Quebec were victims of what Dr David Boeteler, head of the Space Weather Group at Natural Resources Canada, called "the biggest geomagnetic storm of the Space Age."
The appeal of one strange object, which achieved dizzying popularity in my lifetime, and today lives on mostly for nostalgia, is not so difficult to explain. All you need to do is turn one on and wait.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.