An Orsini bomb is a spherical bomb which instead of a fuse or timing device, is surrounded by many small "horns" filled with mercury fulminate. On impact at any angle, these would ignite or detonate the main charge.
The bomb was invented or devised for the Italian nationalist conspirator Felice Orsini, who, with accomplices, threw three at Napoleon III in 1858. The attack failed to kill the Emperor, but killed eight others and wounded 142, including Orsini himself (see Orsini affair for the context). Orsini tested the bomb in Putney, as well as quarries in Sheffield and Devon.
In 1893, in retaliation for the execution of the anarchist Paulí Pallás, who had thrown a bomb at General Arsenio Martínez Campos, the Spanish anarchist Santiago Salvador threw two Orsini bombs into the crowd at Barcelona's Liceu Theater. Only one of the bombs detonated, but it killed 22 people, and injured 35. The unexploded bomb was saved. It is believed that it is the Orsini bomb which is kept in the Museu d'Història de Barcelona (MUHBA), and was temporarily displayed at the Van Gogh Museum in 2007, during an exhibit on Barcelona around 1900.
Antoni Gaudi included a sculpture of a demon handing an Orsini bomb to a working-class male in the exterior of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia cathedral.
Famous quotes containing the word bomb:
“...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)