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For most of human history, the disasters wrought by nature were utterly unpredictable, their causes wholly unknown. They were merely a random act of God that could lay waste to whole cities without warning. On the morning of May 20, 1202, thousands of people across an enormous swath of the Earth experienced such destruction.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.
The appeal of one strange object, which achieved dizzying popularity in my lifetime, and today lives on mostly for nostalgia, is not so difficult to explain. All you need to do is turn one on and wait.
