If you’ve seen a heist movie, then you know the scene where someone describes the complexity of the security system they’ll have to navigate in order to get to the score. Inevitably, the last obstacle is a safe, vault, file cabinet, or what have you secured by… a lock. The history of the lock is filled with ingenious solutions to the problem of keeping valuables safe.
Locks are such an everyday part of our lives that most of us don’t give them a second thought until we lose a key or forget a code and suddenly can’t open one. Most of the time, that’s fine by us, because if locks are functioning correctly, it means we installed them properly.
But there were times in the history of the lock where being noticed was part of the point. And there were times when the lock makers were local heroes, if you can believe it.
You don’t have to be a lock nerd to appreciate the history of the lock because it shows us something about what we value and the ingenious lengths we’ll go to to protect it.
Crocodiles, Sentries, & Hidey Holes: Before the Lock
Before there was anything we would recognize as a lock, there were two primary strategies for protecting valuables: hiding them or placing them somewhere dangerous.
We still hide cash under our mattresses or in our dresser drawers — that’s nothing new. In ancient times, people of meager means would put what valuables they had in a ceramic pot or jar and bury it outside their house or under their floor. The Gospel of Matthew in the Bible refers to this practice in two parables where treasure or a talent is buried for safety.
The wealthy (typically royalty or other aristocracy) could afford to make it difficult and even dangerous to access their valuables. The most obvious way was to hire a sentry to stand guard.
An ancient emperor of India came up with a more elaborate method. He built a pond inside his palace. Then he put his treasure in a wooden box sealed with wax and submerged it in the pond. Just to be safe, he stocked the pond with crocodiles, so-called guardian angels . One had to give the critters a sleeping drug in order to access the box.
Like a Big Toothbrush: The Early History of the Lock
The first known security system you didn’t have to feed was little more than a rope with an elaborate knot. You would either knot yourself into the room you were in, or if you locked up before you went away, you would have to leave the knot exposed, so you had to hope a neighbor would notice a would-be thief fussing with the knot and intervene.
But when we think of a lock, we think of some mechanism involving a bolt or latch that requires some kind of key (or code) to disengage. Our first evidence of that comes from near the ancient city of Nineveh in the kingdom of Assyria (present-day Iraq) some 6,000 years ago. The device involved sliding a wooden bolt behind two braces, one attached to the door and the other to the wall. One brace had wooden pins that would fall into corresponding holes in the bolt and secure it in place.
To open this lock you needed a device that everyone describes as a giant wooden toothbrush. It had wooden pegs that corresponded to the same pins, and you would slide it under the pins and push up, thus disengaging them and allowing you to pull the bolt out.
It’s a simple and elegant principle, called a pin tumbler, that undergirds the most common locks we use today: the Yale lock.
Warding Off Thieves: The First Innovation
The pin tumbler lock was very popular in Egypt — enough to be sometimes called the Egyptian lock — and a more primitive version arose in Greece. The first real innovation, though, came with the Romans, who first fashioned metal locks.
Besides being more durable, the use of metal allowed them to devise a more elaborate keying system, called wards because they literally helped ward off thieves. Wards were metal shapes inside the keyhole that required a key that was cut to fit around them. If you’ve seen the big medieval keys with the elaborately cut rectangular projections, you’ve seen a key to a warded lock.
While later warded lock keys would become large and ostentatious, the Romans thought it more clever to make them small. Some were small enough to wear on a ring on your finger so everyone would know you both could afford a lock and had something to lock up.
The Rise of the Artisan Locksmith
All the locks we’ve looked at to this point were relatively easy to pick for the determined thief. Yet little changed in lock technology for hundreds of years.
However, if you’ve ever seen some of the coats of arms of Europe, you may have noticed that many of them feature keys (of the warded lock variety). Though lock technology did not change, metalworking did, and as Europe shifted from feudalism to mercantilism to capitalism, locksmithing became a booming industry and the cities boasted of the craftmanship and artistry of their locksmiths.
Locks from this period were expertly made with close-fitting metal parts, but they were still based on warding. Almost as if to distract from the fact that they had little new to offer, locks and their keys became more ornate and elaborate.
The main advancements were in hiding the keyhole.
The Key is the Combination: Chinese Puzzle Locks
Meanwhile in China, locksmiths developed the puzzle lock. They are also called maze locks because of the unique way you unlock them.
They look like a long rectangular padlock with a slotted shape cut in one side. The key is more of a broad, flat wand with some number of small prongs on one end. To open the lock, you not only have to figure out how to insert the key, which often involved rotating it, but you had to know the combination of rotating and sliding required to disengage all the inner mechanisms — sort of like navigating a maze solely by feel.
Video gamers may be reminded of the button combos used for elaborate attacks in fighting games. These puzzle locks could have as few as three steps and as many as 20 or more. You wouldn’t want to be the guy who forgot one of the steps; you’d be better off saying you lost the key altogether.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find videos of these, but they are worth the watch. You can also see illustrations in this otherwise pretty technical article.
Age of Invention: Big Steps Forward in Lockmaking
It isn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we see a big leap forward in the engineering of locks. In England and the U.S., men named Chubb and Yale and Sargent, and later, Schlage built on the work of men named Barron, Bramah, and Cotterill to develop new locking technologies and found companies that continue to stand for security and excellence today.
Chubb developed an anti-tampering feature that triggered when someone attempted to pick it, thus frustrating the thief and indicating to the owner that they had been there. Yale developed the cylindrical pin tumbler lock with the slotted keys we use today. Sargent developed locks that could only be opened during set times or that would open on a delay, precursors of the modern smart lock. Schlage introduced a knob set that could be locked and unlocked from the inside without a key.
These innovations made locks smaller, more secure, and more mass producible.
The Present & Future of the Lock
Modern-day smart locks are about control. They empower the user to operate them remotely by thinking of the lock not as an isolated mechanism but as part of a security network connected to a local or cloud-based server.
Locks have become so good at keeping doors shut that much of our access control system technology focuses on convenience of entry and exit. Computers are used to unlock or release doors almost as much as they are to lock them.
Anderson Lock keeps up with the latest technology in locks, safes, and access control systems. Get in touch with us today to learn what cool new gadgets we have in our showroom.