Contemporary society is obsessed with time - it is the most used noun in the English language. The destruction of clocks seems outlandish now. He wasn’t the only one to attack clocks during this period: In Paris, rebels simultaneously destroyed public clocks across the city, and in Bombay, protestors shattered the famous Crawford Market clock with gunfire.Īround the world, people were angry about time.
But because he had primed the device and was walking the zigzagged path, many people - including the Home Office explosives expert, Vivian Dering Majendie, and the novelist Joseph Conrad, who loosely based his book “The Secret Agent” on the event - suspected that Bourdin had wanted to attack the Observatory.īourdin, so the story goes, was trying to bomb clock time, as a symbolic revolutionary act or under a naive pretense that it may actually disrupt the global measurement of time. Numerous theories circulated: that he was testing the bomb in the park for a future attack on a public place or was delivering it to someone else. An investigation showed that he was closely linked to anarchist groups. Nobody knows for sure what Bourdin was trying to do that day. He said nothing about his identity or his motives as he was carried to a nearby hospital, where he died 30 minutes later. Bourdin was moaning and screaming, his legs were shattered, one arm was blown off and there was a hole in his stomach. Rushing out, they saw a park warden and some schoolboys running towards a crouched figure on the ground. The detonation was sharp enough to get the attention of two workers inside. But then, as he stood facing the Observatory, it exploded in his hands. As he got closer to his target, he primed it with a bottle of sulfuric acid.
#DEFINE TYRANNY FULL#
In his left hand, Bourdin carried a bomb: a brown paper bag containing a metal case full of explosives. He wandered up the zigzagged path that led to the Royal Observatory, which just 10 years earlier had been established as the symbolic and scientific center of globally standardized clock time - Greenwich Mean Time - as well as the British Empire. His name was Martial Bourdin - French, 26 years of age, with slicked-back dark hair and a mustache. On a damp and cloudy afternoon on February 15, 1894, a man walked through Greenwich Park in East London. Joe Zadeh is a writer based in Newcastle.
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