This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMoeu.

In 1931, at the height of the Depression, people began hearing that there were going to be jobs in Nevada.

They needed men there to build an enormous dam that would be named after a president Herbert Hoover.

5,000 men, former commodities traders, former op-citrusions, packed up their families and drove to the desert.

Some of them leaving behind the plywood and scrap metal shanty towns that were also named after Herbert Hoover.

When they got there, they found that there were jobs, but that the houses in schools and movie theaters that were supposed to be there hadn't been built yet.

So they hammered some posts into the ground and strung up some sheets that could keep the deserts on off their kids and their wives.

And they went to work.

96 of those men died. When the harnesses that fastened them to the canyon wall, 800 feet in the air snapped.

When the hearts of 50-year-old men who were used to selling women's hosiery were teaching geometry.

When their hearts gave out after working 10-hour shifts in 130-degree heat, chipping a mile-long tunnel beneath a desert inch by edge.

When others fell into wet concrete, they had to be pulled out.

Not before they died, then before the concrete set, and they became a permanent part of the large public works project.

But not long after they finished the dam, orange groves, and althalfa fields, and baseball diamonds, and whole cities grew in the desert.

There's a monument at the Hoover Dam. There are these two enormous bronze angels that are supposed to embody the spirit of the men who designed and built the dam, an American progress or whatever.

But my favorite part of the monument, my favorite thing about the whole dam dam, is actually the angel's feet.

There's an Art Deco Astronomical chart there, done in Toronto, and it's lovely.

And there's some text there that tells you that on September 20th, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the dam.

The text goes on to explain that the chart on the ground shows the precise alignment of the heavens at exactly 856 when FDR spoke.

The same moment that a flagpole that stands between the two angels was aimed straight at the heart of the sun.

Because they were sure we would care.

There's a separate section on the chart that supposedly depicts the precise astronomical location of an Egyptian pyramid.

...