On the morning of August 16, 1894, the din of commerce, streetcars, and horse carts reverberated through the hot summer morning in downtown Buffalo where canals, railroads, and harbor converged. At 10 AM, the city started to quiet as some 20,000 gazed upwards to see a city in the air. That city was Toronto, which lies 59 miles away. The mirage was created by a temperature inversion over Lake Ontario.
Familiar for those who live in Western New York, the temperature of Lake Erie rises and falls seasonally like clockwork. Peaking in late summer in the upper 70’s, the lake eventually cools until mid-winter when it usually freezes at 32 degrees. Lake Ontario is a different animal. Much deeper than Lake Erie, Lake Ontario can be fairly cold in the summer while unfrozen in the winter. As I write this in July, Lake Ontario’s temperature in Rochester is 47 degrees. As warm air passes above cooler air over the lake, it can create a superior mirage.
A mirage is created by refraction (bending) of light as it passes through different mediums. The denser the medium, the greater the refraction. You have seen this before if you place a straw in a glass of water. Water is denser than air and gives the illusion of the straw being bent. You also see this every day when the Sun rises and sets. As sunlight travels from the vacuum of space through more and more dense layers of the atmosphere, it is bent. When the Sun is near the horizon, it is passing through more atmosphere than during midday. The result is we can see the Sun a few minutes before it physically rises above the horizon and few minutes after it physically sinks below the horizon.
A superior mirage is one where the image of an object lies above its location. The lower layer of cold, dense air bends light downwards along the curvature of the Earth. On average, Earth curves downward 16 feet every five miles. This bending of light enables an object below the horizon to be visible to distant observers. The image below demonstrates this effect.
Today, Toronto has an impressive skyline including the CN Tower clocking in at 1,815 feet. In 1894, like most cities, church spirals dominated the skyline of Toronto. It was church spirals that were most prominent in the mirage along with ships navigating Toronto’s harbor, including the 175 foot steamer The Norseman. Below is an image of Toronto as it was in 1894.
The mirage ended after about an hour. Clouds moved in, and later that day, a cold front passed dropping temps into the 60’s terminating the conditions that produced the mirage. There are no photographs of the mirage, and reporting of the event seems muted by today’s standards. The Buffalo Courier had a brief article on page one with the same prominence as catching stray dogs, a husband and wife passing a forged check, and a Peeping Tom who was fined five dollars. The Buffalo Enquirer gave the mirage equal footing with a dog bites man story (dogs really seemed to be a problem back then). Scientific American would report on the mirage a few weeks later.
No doubt, such an event today would receive more coverage, along with YouTube videos. One could imagine thousands of people gazing at the mirage through their cell phones, instantly sending images around the world on social media. The mirage itself would be markedly different with Toronto boasting 57 buildings taller than 500 feet. Not too many steamers ply the lakes these days, but perhaps a modern mirage would feature planes taking off from Toronto Island Airport. As much as things change, the laws of physics remain the same. While a rare event, a future repeat of the 1894 mirage is not out of the question.
*Image atop post is no mirage but Toronto as it appears these days 30 miles away from Niagara-on-the-Lake. Photo: Gregory Pijanowski