Posted on 07/16/2021 9:10:59 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
Spectators were also holding “watch-the-bomb parties” in Hawaii, as the countdown was broadcast over shortwave radio. Photographers aimed their lenses toward the horizon and debated the best camera settings for capturing a thermonuclear explosion in outer space. It turned out that the blast—a 1.4 megaton bomb, 500 times as powerful as the one that fell on Hiroshima—was not subtle.
“When that nuclear weapon went off, the whole sky lit up in every direction. It looked like noon,”
“It looked as though the heavens had belched forth a new sun that flared briefly, but long enough to set the sky on fire,” according to one account in the Hilo Tribune-Herald. An accompanying electromagnetic pulse washed out radio stations, set off an emergency siren, and caused streetlights to black out in Hawaii.
I told my dad years later, ‘You know, if I knew I was going to become a nuclear weapon physicist, I would have paid more attention,’” he says.
There is no mushroom cloud or double flash. People on the ground don’t feel a shock wave or hear any sound. There’s just a bright ball of plasma
This unexpected “Starfish belt,” which lingered for at least 10 years, destroyed Telstar 1, the first satellite to broadcast a live television signal, and Ariel-1, Britain’s first satellite.
The largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, called the Carrington Event, hit Earth in 1859. It caused auroras over Australia and gave electrical shocks to telegraph operators in America.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalgeographic.com ...
I would have liked to have seen that!
Because we could and it was cool.
Not as cool as sending a tesla roadster into space to cruise the cosmos
Because we are global badasses when not encumbered by cisgendered-zero carbon footprint-vegan Generals ...
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Does anyone know how the telegraph lines were electrified during the Civil War and before? Dynamo?
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The noive!
The Xandorthians have already stolen the wheels off that car.
Early systems were both battery & dynamo. Later systems, I think all commercial were dynamo.
Batteries, wet cell batteries...
I once saw Civil War reenacters who re-created an old Army telegraph station. They had all of this vintage telegraph equipment - it was amazing. I’m pretty sure they powered things with big batteries.
July 8, 1962
There’s a very excellent documentary available called “Trinity and Beyond” that documents the US nuclear test programs up until the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Part of it shows the high-altitude tests conducted at Johnston Island. One of them knocked out power over a large area of the pacific from the EMP effect. Those were the days!
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I just entered suck@wuck.net
and it let me read the rest of the article. LOL fer realz
Magnetos, hand-cranked. Real cutting edge tech for the time.
I remember when that happened, although we did not see anything as we were too far away.
It did make another radiation belt around the earth. Some were worried it might set the Van Allen Radiation belt on fire as shown in the 1961 movie VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.
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