On this day in 1909 a mysterious explosion in a pile of scrap metal in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, injured one man and three boys.
Samuel Rosessky, a junk dealer, along with his driver, Nathan Lipman, had collected the junk metal from around town and had brought it back to his shop to sift through for anything worth selling. With them were Samuel’s son, Nathan, 12, and two other boys, 10 year-old Benjamin Feinberg and 12 year-old Robert Levy.
Samuel told his son to strip the insulation from some wire they had salvaged. As he began to do what his father requested, by burning the insulation, a tremendous explosion occurred.
Injured were Nathan Lipman, whose arms, legs, forehead and hands were lacerated by flying scrap; Benjamin, whose left eye was destroyed by a nail and metal mutilating the front of his body; Robert, whose main artery in one of his legs severed and nearly killing him, along with lacerations by flying metal; and Nathan Rosessky, whose hands were shattered and the front of his body filled with bits of metal.
It was determined that someone, unknown, had placed a bomb in scrap to be sold and that young Nathan Rosessky had inadvertently lit its fuse when he thought he was burning insulation from a wire.