Balfour Stone

Balfour Stewart recorded remarkable geomagnetic disturbances on the evening of 28 August 1859 and the morning of 2 September 1859, at the Kew Observatory, and presented his findings in a paper presented to the Royal Society on 21 November 1861. He noted that while "magnetic disturbances of unusual violence and very wide extent" were recorded in various places around the world, the Kew Observatory had the benefit of self-recording magnetographs, which allowed "the means of obtaining a continuous photographic register of the state of the three elements of the Earth’s magnetic force—namely, the declination, and the horizontal and vertical intensity." Stewart went on the make the following…