The Carrington Event
On September 1st, 1859, the biggest solar explosion in the past five hundred years hit Earth. It was so massive that it disrupted the world's newborn telegraph system and caused the Aurora Borealis to be seen as far south as Montería, Colombia (latitude 8° 45′ N). This event was named after the astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed and recorded a "white light flare" in the solar photosphere at the moment of the event.
Source: Tyson, Neil deGrasse, and Avis Lang. Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Image by NASA/SDO
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!