This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMaio. They could suddenly control time. It changed everything.

Time was that if they wanted to blow something up, they would have to throw a bomb themselves,

which was dangerous beyond the obvious. If you survive the throwing and the blowing up,

you'd have to get away if you wanted to get away with it.

But in the Civil War, Confederate engineer had figured out a number of methods

for attaching timers to incendiary devices.

They were crude and unreliable, but they were inspiring.

To militaries, to mining engineers, to saboteurs and murderers, and they got better.

And by 1910 there were men, some unknown number, dozens, likely more, men whose job was to place time bombs.

To travel the country, check into a hotel, build the bomb, sticks of dynamite,

wires, and alarm clock, check out of the hotel, place the bomb, get on a train, and be long gone

by the time it went off. John McNamara charged $200 for this work.

I do not know if that included expenses or not,

or if he had to cover the trip to Los Angeles, or the hotel on Fifth Street downtown,

where he built the bomb for what would turn out to be the final job of his career.

It was supposed to be routine.

Shouldn't have been any more dangerous than any other mission.

Dynamite is quite stable as explosives go. The wiring was simple enough. The clockwork was literally metaphorically reliable.

And men like McNamara who did this work, more or less got to the point where the only real worry was that the thing might not blow up.

That someone might find a bomb that had failed to explode and

that maybe the cops would start tracing things back to the people who hired them,

but really, the cops didn't even seem to care anymore.

...