Читать книгу Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks - Dodd George - Страница 8

“A cap-case for your linen and your plate,

With a strange lock that opens with A·M·E·N.”

And in some verses by Carew, written about the same time, there is an analogy drawn, in which one of the things compared is—

“A lock

That goes with letters; for till every one be known,

The lock’s as fast as if you had found none.”

In the Memorabilia of Vanhagen von Ense, written about the middle of the seventeenth century, a commendatory notice is given of a letter-lock, or combination-lock, invented by M. Regnier, Director of the Musée d’Artillerie at Paris. “Regnier,” we are told, “was a man of some invention, and had taken out a patent for a sort of lock, which made some noise at the time. Every body praised his invention, and bought his locks. These consisted of broad steel rings, four, five, or eight deep, upon each of which the alphabet was engraved; these turned round on a cylinder of steel, and only separated when the letters forming a particular word were in a straight line with one another. The word was selected from among a thousand, and the choice was the secret of the purchaser. Any one not knowing the word might turn the ring round for years without succeeding in finding the right one. The workmanship was excellent, and Regnier was prouder of this than of the invention itself. The latter point might be contested. I had a vague recollection of having seen something of the sort before; but when I ventured to say so, my suspicions were treated with scorn and indignation, and I was not able to prove my assertion; but many years afterwards, when a book, which as a boy I had often diligently read, fell into my hands, Regnier’s lock was suddenly displayed. The book was called Silvestri a Petrasancta Symbola Heroica, printed at Amsterdam in 1682. There was an explanation at p. 254, attached to a picture; these were the words:—Honorius de Bellis, serulæ innexæ orbibus volubilibus ac literatis circumscripsit hoc lemma—Sorte aut labore.[3] However, neither luck nor labour would have done much more towards discovering the secret of opening Regnier’s locks, from the variety of their combinations; and their security seemed so great, that the couriers’ despatch-boxes were generally fastened with them.”

[3] “Honorius de Bellis wrote this inscription,—By chance or by labour,—round a lock composed of revolving rings graven with letters.”

This curious extract, which was brought forward by Mr. Chubb, in a paper on locks and keys (read before the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1850), seems to take away the credit from one (Regnier) with whose name the letter-lock has been most intimately associated. We shall presently explain, however, what it was that Regnier effected towards perfecting the letter-lock. In the meantime it may be interesting to note that the British Museum contains a copy of the work mentioned by Vanhagen. At the page indicated there is an engraving (a fac-simile of which is given in fig. 5) containing a drawing of a veritable puzzle or letter-lock; the lock consists of a cylinder or barrel, on which seven rings work; each of these rings is inscribed with letters, and the ends of the cylinder are grasped by a kind of shackle.

fig. 5. Puzzle-lock of the seventeenth century.

It was a natural result of the arrangement of the letter-lock, as invented (conjecturally) by Cardan, that only one particular word or cipher or key could be used in each lock; and it was to increase the puzzle-power of the lock that Regnier doubled all the rings, making each pair concentric, and enabling the user to vary the cipher at pleasure.

The principle of the letter-lock, when applied to doors, requires that sort of modification which renders it what is termed a dial-lock. There are to such a lock one or more dials, with a series of letters or figures stamped on them; there is to each dial a hand or pointer connected by a spindle with a wheel inside the lock; on the wheel is a notch which has to be brought to a certain position before the bolt can be moved. There are false notches, to add to the difficulty of finding the true notch in each wheel. To adjust the notches to their proper position, a nut on the back of the wheel is loosened, and the pointer is set at any letter or figure chosen by the user. The pointers and the dials perform the part of the outer rings, the wheels that of the inner rings; and it is easy to see that the same leading features prevail in the two kinds of lock, however they may differ in detail.

These dial-locks have not been numerous; they require wheel and pinion work within the body of the lock, which gives delicacy and complication to the mechanism. The letter padlock, be its merits great or small, is strong and durable, not liable to get out of order; and in so far as it requires no key or key-hole, it occupies rather a special position among locks. One of our great “merchant-princes” has been a letter-lock inventor, as the following will shew.

Early in 1852, Mr. William Brown, the distinguished member for South Lancashire, read a paper before the Architectural and Archæological Society of Liverpool, of much interest in relation to our present subject. His object was to describe a letter-lock which he had invented, and which had up to that time given high satisfaction. We cannot do better than transcribe the paper, as reported in one of the Liverpool Journals, with a few abridgments.

“As your society are desirous of seeing any improvements or attempts at them, I send you a stock-lock for inspection. The idea for its construction I took from a letter-padlock. I had a lock of this description made by Mr. Pooley twenty-five years ago, which has been in use ever since on Brown, Shipley, and Co.’s safe....

“Its advantages I conceive to be—First, it cannot be picked, for there is no key-hole. Second, it cannot be blown up by gunpowder, for the same reason. Third, you cannot drill through the door so as to reach the lock, for you are intercepted by a steel plate on which your tools will not act: thus you cannot introduce gunpowder that way to force the lock off. Fourth, you cannot bounce off the wheels in the interior with a muffled hammer, for vulcanised India-rubber springs resist this. Fifth, you cannot drill the spindles out, as their heads are case-hardened. Sixth, you cannot drive them in, for they are countersunk in the door about half-way through....

“Now let us set the lock to the word WOOD (any other four letters might be used). When you set the lock, make a private record of them, so that you may not forget them. If parties do not know your letters, nothing but violence, applied by some means or other, can enable them to get into your safe; for the lock will not open to any thing but its talisman. Take off all the large wheels and open the lock: you will see that the large wheels have a number of false chambers; if you get the spurs of the bolt into three real chambers and one false, you are as fast as ever, for all four must be right.

“Having placed your key and pointer outside the door to point to W on brass-plate No. 1, the small wheel inside obeys the same impulse; then maintain your small wheel steadily on this point, and the large wheel No. 1 will only fit on at the right place, the true opening compartment being opposite the spur of the bolt. It being necessary at the time you set your lock that it should be open, proceed with Nos. 2 and 3 in the same way, your pointer standing steadily at O. No. 4 is the same, the pointer being held steadily at D. You should then shoot your lock two or three times, to be sure you have made no mistake. Every time you shoot your bolts out, turn your wheels away from the true chamber, and see when you again turn your pointers to WOOD that your lock opens freely; it is the proof that you have made no mistake, and you may now venture to lock your safe. When you unlock the door, and find it necessary to leave it open for a time, you should shoot the bolts as if locked, and turn the wheels, so that no one may find what your real letters are; and again adjust them to their proper places, in order that the bolt may go back and enable you to re-lock. Once having locked the door and turned the wheels from your real letters, you need not trouble yourself with carrying the key, but leave it in any place beside the lock.

“I believe two wheels would make a perfectly safe lock; three would be quite so. I adopted four to make security doubly sure, as it would be impossible in any given time to work the changes. On two wheels by chance the lock might open; you can, however, calculate the chances against this; and also three or four, the false compartment on the outer rim being taken into calculation. ***

“If this lock is of any value, it should be known; if it has weak points, let them be pointed out, and they may admit of a remedy; for we ought not to be led to believe a lock is safe which is not so.”

In relation to the “first advantage” which Mr. Brown not unreasonably supposed to be possessed by his lock—viz. that “it cannot be picked, because it has no keyhole”—we shall have something to say in a future page, where certain fallacies on this subject will be noticed. In the meantime we may remark, that it is not a little creditable that a leading Liverpool merchant should have invented a lock worthy of occupying a position on his own safe for a quarter of a century; for we may be quite certain that he would not have allowed the lock to maintain that post of honour unless it had really (so far as experience had then gone) served worthily as a safeguard to his treasures. And if it were possible to collect all the by-gone specimens of lock-oddities, we should probably find among them many highly-ingenious letter-locks; for supposing a man to have a mechanical turn of mind, a lock is by no means an unworthy medium for displaying it; the pieces of metal are so small as to be easily manageable at a small work-bench in a small room. The fondness for this sort of employment evinced by the unfortunate Louis XVI. of France led to the common remark, “He is a capital locksmith, but a very bad king.”

In an amusing article in the Observer, during the progress of the “lock controversy,” was the following paragraph relating to combination-locks of the letter or puzzle kind: “The French, in their exposition of 1844, availing themselves of the permutation principle, produced some marvels in the art; but the principle has not been adopted in this country. The Charivari had an amusing quiz upon these locks when they first came out. It said the proprietor of such a lock must have an excellent memory: forget the letters, and you are clearly shut out from your own house. For instance, a gentleman gets to his door with his family, after a country excursion, at eleven o’clock at night, in the midst of a perfect deluge of rain. He hunts out his alphabetical key, and thrusts it into his alphabetical lock, and says AZBX. The lock remains as firm as ever. ‘Plague take it!’ says the worthy citizen, as the blinding rain drives in his eyes. He then recollects that that was his combination for the previous day. He scratches his head to facilitate the movement of his intellectual faculties, and makes a random guess BCLO; but he has no better success. In addition to his being well wet, his chances of hitting on the right combinations and permutations are but small, seeing that the number is somewhere about three millions five hundred and fifty-three thousand five hundred and seventy-eight. Accordingly, when he comes to the three-hundredth he loses all patience, and begins to kick and batter the door; but a patrol of the National Guard passes by, and the disturber of the streets is marched off to the watch-house.”