One swallow does not make a summer: 160 years of Richard Carrington's legacy

Abstract On 1 September 1859, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed an anomalous behavior on the Sun. Approximately 17 hours later, magnetic effects of global scales were observed at Earth: aurora borealis and australis in low-latitude regions, and telegraphic equipment failures in Europe and North America. Nowadays, 160 years later, we know that solar-terrestrial connections control the magnetic activity in the geospace and on the ground, and their effects are subject of a discipline named space weather. The main goal of this modest work is to briefly present to the reader Carrington's observations and the discoveries that led to the connection between solar and terrestrial magnetic phenomena. Implications of this discovery to space weather with emphasis on the protection of technological systems in the geospace and on the ground, and a brief discussion on the future of the discipline, are briefly presented as well.