This is the memory palace, Omnietemau.

The first time the river caught fire, Cleveland was just starting to be something.

Starting to fulfill the promise that Benjamin Franklin had seen nearly a century before.

When he envisioned a great settlement, perhaps the best place in America for the American

ideal to take root.

A fruited plane along the banks of the Koya Hoga, where the citizen farmer, the new American,

could rise up, and where a great port city could rise at the river's mouth.

Where it fed Lake Erie, and where that American could bring the fruits of his labors, and send

them across the lake, in out to the world beyond.

And so the city grew bit by bit, new homesteads dotting the riverside, lit by lamps fueled

by oil, extracted from slabs of blubber cut from the bellies of whales.

But by mid-century people had killed most of the whales, while looking for that oil.

And they wanted an alternative, because they had gotten used to being able to see it

night.

And they found it not far from Cleveland.

In a dark green goop that oozed from the hillsides of western Pennsylvania.

And they found that if you pulled it out of the ground and distilled it, you could stop

chasing whales.

And by 1863, John D. Rockefeller had found the newest, and it would turn out one of the

most enduring ways to make a killing in America.

It wasn't in drilling for oil, not at first.

It was in refining it, in turning that goop into kerosene or lubricant, where anything

...