What happened during the solar maximum of 1958?
I had just become an active amateur astronomer at that time, and was involved in a couple of IGY programs observing aurora and meteors. We had many fine auroras, many of which were observable from my home in a suburb of Montreal. I carried out solar observations myself for a while, counting sunspots with my telescope. Will, we had progressed beyond vacuum tubes in 1958! Despite the fact that the transistor was first manufactured commercially only four years earlier, transistor radios were widely available by 1958. I owned a very compact Sony shortwave transistor radio which I used to bring in time signals while observing in 1958. Because of the space race, which was in full swing at the time, new technology like transistors were adopted very quickly.
