It’s only as we brought fire under better control that we stopped thinking so much about it—and, with climate change, that may be shifting again.

The early plastic called celluloid was made of nitrocellulose and camphor. It made for spectacular pictures. It also made for spectacular fires.

On the same night as Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, some 2,400 square miles of Wisconsin and Michigan burned in a firestorm that took more than 1,000 lives.

A hundred years after the cosmopolitan city burnt to the ground, the truth about who started the fire and why remains a point of contention.