For the manufacture of these and other locks, and kindred articles, Messrs. J. B. Fenby and Co., engineers of the Liverpool Works, Birmingham, have put up, from the designs of their managing partner, Mr. J. Beverley Fenby, an experimental set of machinery, almost entirely self-acting, and calculated to turn out large quantities of the component parts of locks and other articles with extreme accuracy and rapidity.
The whole set works on the interchangeable system—as already in use for military small arms. It is not, however, to be supposed that, because the parts of the locks are interchangeable, one key will open several locks—such a source of insecurity being guarded against by the permutating key-cutting machines invented by Mr. Fenby. These machines give complete command over the making of keys, whether it be required to make a comparatively unlimited number, all differing from each other, to make a number alike, or to make sets with master keys.
Atmospheric and hydraulic pressure also plays an important part in shaping many of the parts of the locks.
NOTE UPON IRON SAFES.
At the conclusion of this work upon locks it will not be out of place to make a few remarks upon the degree of real safety that attaches to what are commonly called “safes,” and to point out in a common-sense way what are the chief dangers that these may incur from depredators (whether burglars or in times of public anarchy and violence), and what are the main conditions to be relied upon for safety—assuming that, by one or other of the constructions pointed out in the preceding pages, the lock of the safe be such as to be practically unpickable, and that carelessness shall not have placed the true key in the possession of the thief.
There can be no doubt upon the mind of any mechanic or engineer, thoroughly acquainted with practical working in metals, that a good deal of what has been brought forward and affirmed, both by safe-makers and by burglars themselves (turned approvers), as to the wonderfully-ingenious devices resorted to by the latter, by which, if we were to believe it all, nothing in the shape of steel or iron can possibly withstand ultimately the redoubtable powers of these people, is simply fiction—imaginary ingenuity utterly impracticable if tried. Such, for example, is the notion of its being possible, by an ounce or two of gunpowder exploded in the interior, to so blow asunder and dislocate the parts of a well-made safe-lock that the bolts shall then be easily got loose, or that a steel-plated safe which resists the drill can be softened “by the blowpipe.” And just as absurd are some of the wonderful pieces of ingenuity by which some of the burglars’ actual devices are supposed to be met and frustrated; as, for example, one for which we believe a patent has been obtained, consisting in filling-in the hollow space between the inside and outside plates of the safe with cast-iron bullets left loose. These might, no doubt, break a flat-stemmed drill, after that had pierced the outer plate, but could have no effect whatever upon a round-shanked drill, such as one of the ordinary American spiral, or teredo-pointed drills.
That there are some methods of violence still untried, and yet at the command of the burglar who dares to risk a tolerably loud noise of explosive agents, is well known to skilful mechanical engineers, and for obvious reasons it would be unwise that we should give any information as to such; but the real practical and too-often effectual methods of the burglar limit themselves almost entirely to the use of the succession of steel wedges, followed by the powerful steel-pointed pinching bar, or bars, to the forcing or prizing-screw, and to making more or less way for this by cutting out beforehand by the pin-drill.
A safe, to be safe, must be so circumstanced or so constructed, or both, that it should be able to resist the best efforts that can be made by these methods for several hours; perhaps we might say as much as thirty to thirty-six hours—viz., from Saturday night to Monday morning.
Now we hesitate not to say that the unsafeness of “safes” arises not from any structural difficulty whatever, but almost always from the parsimony and ignorance of those who purchase and employ them. Safes, like razors, are made to sell, and if the public demand is for cheap safes, such as we see every day advertised in the newspapers, it was sure to have been, and is, met by a supply of things called safes which are utterly unsafe. The great mass of the showy green and gold gewgaws that one sees in the safe-shop windows, with flaming testimonials as to their fire and burglar-proof powers, are simple shams: a genuine safe could not be made at their prices.