Since before the time of the Pharaohs, people have been using keys to lock things up. Such a simple everyday purely mechanical device, which we all use everyday and which has travelled with us since the dawn of human kinds civilisations.
In fact when you think on it, the metal key has proved remarkably resilient, even in the time of electronic locks. In antiquity the key was claimed to have been invented by 'Theodore of Samos' in 6th century BC Greece
(they tended to claim credit for everything), but its more likely that it was invented in Assyria, as the earliest known lock and key device was discovered in the ruins of 'Nineveh', the capital of that ancient state, and much the same technology was known to have been used in Egypt around the same time.
The Egyptian version was remarkably similar to what we use for our key locks today ... the Egyptians had a wooden
pin lock, which consisted of a bolt, door fixture, and key. When the key was inserted, pins within the fixture were lifted out of drilled holes within the bolt, allowing it to move. When the key was removed, the pins fell part-way into the bolt, preventing movement ... they even came up with the
warded lock, which remains the most recognizable lock and key design in the Western world.
Strangely, as far as we know, the usually very inventive Romans made no changes to that basic couple of models, with affluent Romans keeping their valuables in secure boxes within their households, while wearing the keys as 'rings on their fingers'. So the lock and key idea was already over a thousand years old before its next change.
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| The Lock And Key An Old Invention |
In fact we can give ourselves in England a little back pat here, because the first all-metal lock appeared between the years 870 AD and 900 AD , and are attributed to English (Saxon?) craftsmen ..... Englishmen also made the next improvement, when firstly locksmith, Robert Barron invented the double–acting
tumbler lock in 1778 AD, and then when this was greatly improved upon by Jeremiah Chubb in 1818, with both designs based on the use of movable levers. He won a competition run by the British Admiralty to produce a lock that could be opened only with its own key. Up until then locks didn't have unique keys.
There was a rival design by the British inventor,
Joseph Bramah, in 1784. Using the cutting edge of the precision machine tooling capabilities of the time, and which was deemed unbreakable. His lock used a cylindrical key with precise notches along the surface; these moved the metal slides that restricted the turning of the bolt into an exact alignment, allowing the lock to open.
The last of the modern locks was a double-acting
pin tumbler lock invented by American Abraham O. Stansbury in England in 1805, but the version still in use today was invented by American
Linus Yale, Sr. in 1848. This lock design used
pins of varying lengths to prevent the lock from opening without the correct key.
In 1861, his son of the same name patented a smaller flat key with serrated edges as well as pins of varying lengths within the lock itself, which while used today but in a nice synchronicity is essentially a more developed version of the Egyptian lock.
And that more or less was what we have now with just the three basic designs .... the same designs of Bramah, Chubb and Yale.
However as electronic locking devices become ever-more popular, especially for cars are the days of the humble key numbered? Well if reports are correct
(and who am I to argue with the 'The Times' newspaper of London?), possibly not. It seems that Range Rover vehicles with key-less ignitions are being targeted by thieves, and consequently are now hard to insure in London. It appears that thieves have hit on a method of getting inside the vehicles, and copying their key-less ignition code using a device bought on the internet.
But industry insiders say that this will be cracked soon with vehicles made secure by using a different code every time the vehicle is locked and soon key fobs are to replaced by a smartphone with a varying code that unlocks the vehicle ......
hmm we will see.
Of course hotel room keys started converting to ditch metal keys. The first key cards were introduced at a hotel in Atlanta, US, in 1979. The swipe card has been widely taken up, not only for security reasons - it reduces wasted electricity, since a guest can only operate the lights with the key in the holder. It also enables hotel staff to know when the guest is in their room, and, importantly, it means the lock does not need to be replaced if the key is lost.
This, and variants on the electric car lock, such as smartphone apps are being brought in for some houses ... but even if key-less systems take off, most people do not live in new-build housing. Retrofitting homes with smart high-tech locks, would be expensive and impractical, so the metal key and lock may have another century of life at the very least and probably a lot longer than that.
Oh, and a bit of trivia ... Bramah called his lock the "
Challenge Lock" and offered a reward of reward of £200 to
"...the artist who can make an instrument that will pick or open this lock". The challenge stood for over 67 years until, at the
Great Exhibition of 1851, the American locksmith
Alfred Charles Hobbs was able to open the lock .... eventually. It took Hobbs' some 51 hours, spread over 16 days before he cracked (hardly Raffles like then) and not exactly in the spirit of the challenge but, following some argument about the circumstances under which he had opened it, he was awarded the prize.
And to cement the keys place as one of man's oldest inventions, in 2013 'Timpsons', the UK key cutting store, sold about 16,250,000 keys - its highest total ever. Finally, humans are actually very conservative, so remembering codes and passwords is a nightmare for most of us
(just look at the PC passwords we all have to remember), so you just can't beat the simple straightforwardness and satisfaction of a key.
