COMMUNICATIONS Solar Bombardment
On Easter Sunday, telegraph wires hummed with holiday messages. Suddenly something went blooey. Teletype messages began to arrive in jumbles like pied type. Short-wave radio to Europe, to ships at sea, was blotted out, stayed blotted for several hours. Wire photos arrived looking like surrealistic blobs. Cursing engineers pronounced it the worst disruption of service in the historyof long-distance telephone and radio communication.
Cause of the trouble: sunspots. According to astronomers' most plausible theory, sunspots shoot out streams of protons and electrons, electrified subatomic particles. The group of spots on the sun last week was 400,000,000...
