The Inside Story: Locks ~ The key to it all

“STUPID LOCKS! Who on earth invented them? Look at the mess we’re in now!” I stamp my foot outside our house, kick at the door, mad at being unable to find the right key. My parents, who are visiting my Didima, were sure my cousin Rohit and I could let ourselves in. After all, it’s only 4 p.m.

I empty out my schoolbag, but all I find are a clutter of pens, pencils, erasers, a tangle of string and too many textbooks for any one child. “Have you tried your pocket?” suggests Rohit. I stick my hand into my pinafore. And withdraw it sheepishly ~ with the key gripped tightly in my fist.

Rohit, who’s two years older, two inches taller, and almost smarter than me, offers to put together tea for us. He’s a whiz at baking, believe me! As I run up to my room to change into shorts and a T-shirt, a gentle breeze ruffles my hair, while a voice whispers, ”Do you know how old the oldest locks are?”

I hug Iffy, almost knocking him over. He’s my secret best friend, who’s appeared out of the blue. “Can we find out more about locks?” I beg him. Wordlessly, he wraps me in his invisibility cloak ~ and off we zoom.

Unusually, our first stop is a Bible showroom. What on earth are we doing here, I nudge Iffy. In response, he points out references to keys in the Isaiah passages. “They opened the oldest lock known to mankind, the pin-tumbler or Egyptian lock,” explains Iffy, as I gape at the rusty remains of the 3,000-year old contraption, found on the door of a palace in Khorsabad in Iraq.

In seconds, we zip over to look at some Egyptian carvings or bas reliefs dating back to 2000 BC. “Isn’t that a lock?” I point to a drawing in shock. Iffy nods. “These locks contained pins that kept the bolts from moving. When a brush-like key was put in, its pegs lifted the pins, unlocking the whole,” says Iffy. That’s cool!

Does that mean the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had a hand in everything clever, were left out? In a trice, Iffy and I frown over a bolt buried deep inside a door.
”That’s what the ancient Greeks used,” he says, “while the Romans came up with the ward lock…”

What’s that, I pester him. Peering into a strange-looking device, he answers, “Look, the wards or baffles project into the lock. Only a key to match the wards could unlock it.” Magically, he holds a tiny key on a ring out to me. “That could open a teeny-tiny lock the Romans invented,” he says mysteriously.

But we watch dozens of clever thieves pick the ward locks, common even in 18^th century Europe, with keys coated with wax to make duplicates. Not such a smart idea after all, I mutter.

“Watch this!” offers Iffy, as we catch up with Robert Barron, an Englishman who invented a lock with two tumblers in 1778. What’s a tumbler, I ask. “It’s a lever or pin whose position must be changed to open the lock,” Iffy tells me.

To my amazement, Iffy whizzes us off to London around 1790, where we watch a locksmith named Joseph Braman hang a notice in his shop window. It reads, “The Artist who can make an Instrument that will pick or Open this Lock shall Receive 200 Guineas the Moment it is produced. Applications in Writing Only.”

Then what happened, I wonder, intrigued by it all. “Braman’s design placed the slides, which kept the bolts in place, in a radial manner. It opened with a cylindrical key,” Iffy points out. For 60 years, even after Braman died, no one could best him.

Suddenly, we’re at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. A New York locksmith named Alfred Charles Hobbs decided he would rise to the occasion. He worked on the lock for a few hours a day over a month ~ and then asked the Braman representatives over. What did they find? Their lock with its hasp open! My mouth hangs open at the sight.

           Iffy next takes me to visit Linus Yale, Jr., a painter who gave up on canvases to take up his father’s profession as a locksmith. In the 1850s, we watch him unlock all the best locks of his time, even the Parautopic Lock. “Guess what?” adds Iffy. “Often, he’d lock his own locks so that even their own keys proved useless.”

By 1861, Yale patented his cylinder lock. “It could be used on a door of any thickness, based on the Egyptian pin-tumbler principle,” explains Iffy. “These were mass produced, the world’s first unidentical objects thus turned out.” Isn’t that mind-boggling!

 

            As we hover close to our house, Iffy produces a bunch of strange locks. “Some locks today can be unlocked only by magnetic codes,” he says. “Others respond to small cards, which are actually electric circuits that trigger radio transmitters inside the lock. And very recently, there’s a lock that responds only to the sound of its owner’s voice.”

            “That lock would be perfect for me,” I shout out loud, as I reach home in time for Rohit’s scrumptious tea. But he hasn’t been with Iffy and me on our finding-out adventure. Should I tell him all about it? What do you think?