On the 30th of December, 1903, a fire began on the stage at the newly-built Iroquois Theater in Chicago, Illinois. Advertisements for the theatre had boasted that it was “absolutely fireproof”… but it was far from it. Indeed, the design of the theatre building lead to a death toll that outstripped that of any single building fire in all of American history, and lead to changes to the design of mass-occupancy buildings that are still in place today.