- Born 16 September 1920. Anarchist Mario Buda placed a car bomb near Wall Street to avenge the arrest of his two companions, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco. The Italian prepared 45 kilos of dynamite and 230 kilos of shrapnel, which caused the car to explode at noon. It caused 38 deaths and more than 400 injuries. Henry Ford started producing cars in the series ten years earlier, so you can say a car bomb was invented just as soon as it began to spread like a consumer object. Technically, Buddha's was the first car bomb in history. However, the concept is older, 120 years old.
On Christmas Eve of 1800, the first consul Napoleon Bonaparte walked through Saint-Nicaise Street in Paris, where a cabriolé exploded. The trolley of the bombs had a barrel of gunpowder attached. The explosion did not hit the ceiling of the bomb, but caused numerous material damage and deaths.
Georges Lenôtre brutally described the attack in La petite histoire. “A piece of bare flesh in the canyon: it is a girl, with her skin torn, the cranium torn apart, with no arms. One man is 30 meters away and the other over the cornice of the house in front. The horse he was in charge has nothing but his head; the carriage has nothing but an arch and a piece of axis that they found later on on on the roof of the Hotel Longueville.”
Consul Bonaparte pleaded the Jacobins guilty. But police minister Joseph Fouché set in motion a novel method of deduction based on evidence that led to the conclusion that the perpetrators of the attack were at the other end: the realists prepared and flew the car.
Fouché's method became very important from then on, driven primarily by Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. And needless to say, the anarchist Mario Buddha was not the only follower of what the French monarchists invented.