The car bomb is ubiquitous as a terrorist tactic today, but since we’ve only had fancy horseless carraiges for about a century now, it must have a modern origin. When and where was the first use of the car bomb? Were there “chariot bombs” or “carriage bombs”? What individual or group was responsible for perfecting modern car bombing technique? Morbidly inquiring minds want to know!
the Irish Republican Army used a bicycle bomb in their 1939 campaign in England the car as a bomb doesn’t seem to have appeared until the early '70s. Until the '60s cars were still things which you had to be fairly wealthy to run (the ability to drive still wasn’t universal) and only when their ownership became universal could a car bomb hope to pass in the crowd of other cars.
In NYC in 1920 a horsecar loaded with explosives was detonated in front of the House of Morgan, JP Morgan’s Wall street firm. The resulting explosion killed and maimed several bystanders. JP was not in the vicinity, incidentally.
The police tried to track down the culprits – believed to be those old rascals The Anarchists – by tracing one or more horse shoes (little else of the beast remained) and the window sash weights that served as shrapnel. They were unsuccessful and the crime remains unsolved to this day. The pockmarks from the explosion can still be seen on the stonework of the Morgan building.
The Bath Scool Explosion was an early carbombing, ciraca 1927.
Done as an anti-tax protest, there was a massive death toll at the school. All community leadership was killed off in the blast, & the tons of explosives inside the school would have created even more havoc, if not for a wiring error.