You might not be aware that the tomatoes you most likely buy at the store today are not the same that you might have eaten just, say, around seventy years ago. In fact, your tomatoes likely taste worse. Because tomatoes were forever changed by an invention that most people have likely never seen, nor even thought about.
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.
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.