Master, or secondary key locks, are now in common use in hotels and apartment-houses, by which the key of the door held by a guest will unlock only his door, but the master key held by the manager or janitor will unlock all the doors. This saves the duplication and multiplicity of a vast number of extra keys.
The value of a simple, cheap, safe, effective lock in a place where its advantages are appreciated by all classes of people everywhere is illustrated in the application of the modern rotary registering lock to the single article of mail bags. Formerly it was not unusual that losses by theft of mail matter were due in part to the extraction of a portion of the mail matter by unlocking or removing the lock and then restoring it in place.
The United States, with its 76,000,000 of people, found it necessary to use in its mail service hundreds of thousands of mail pouches, having locks for securing packages of valuable matter. But these locks are of such character that it is impossible for anyone to break into the bag and conceal the evidence of his crime. The unfortunate thief is reduced to the necessity of stealing the whole pouch. Losses under this system have grown so small “as to be almost incapable of mathematical calculation.”
Safe and convenient locks for so very many purposes are now so common, even to prevent the unauthorised use of an umbrella, or the unfriendly taking away of a bicycle or other vehicle, that notwithstanding the nineteenth century dynamite with which burglars still continue to blow open the best constructed safes and vaults, still a universal sense of greater security in such matters is beginning to manifest itself; and not only the loss of valuables by fire and theft is becoming the exception, but the temptation to steal is being gradually removed.
[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
CARRYING MACHINES.
The reflecting observer delights occasionally to shift the scenes of the present stage and bring to the front the processions of the past. That famous triumphal one, for instance, of Ptolemy of Philadelphus, at Alexandria, about 270 B. C., then in the midst of his power and glory, in which there were chariots and cumbrous wagons drawn by elephants and goats, antelopes, oryxes, buffaloes, ostriches, gnus and zebras; then a tribe of the Scythians, when with many scores of oxen they were shifting their light, big round houses, made of felt cloth and mounted on road carts, to a new camping place; next a wild, mad dash of the Roman charioteers around the amphitheatre, or a triumphal march with chariots of carved ivory bearing aloft the ensigns of victory; and now an army of the ancient Britons driving through these same charioteers of Cæsar with their own rude chariots, having sharp hooks and crooked iron blades extending from their axles; now a “Lady’s Chair” of the fourteenth century—the state carriage of the time—with a long, wooden-roofed and windowed body, having a door at each end, resting on a cumbrous frame without springs, and the axles united rigidly to a long reach; next comes a line of imposing clumsy state coaches of the sixteenth century, with bodies provided with pillars to support the roof, and adorned with curtains of cloth and leather, but still destitute of springs; and here in stately approach comes a line of more curious and more comfortable “royal coaches” of the seventeenth century, when springs were for the first time introduced; and now rumbles forward a line of those famous old English stage coaches originated in the seventeenth century, which were two days flying from Oxford to London, a distance of fifty-five miles; but a scene in the next century shows these ponderous vehicles greatly improved, and the modern English stage mail-coaches of Palmer in line. Referring to Palmer’s coaches, Knight says: “Palmer, according to De Quincey, was twice as great a man as Galileo, because he not only invented mail-coaches (of more general practical utility than Jupiter’s satellites), but married the daughter of a duke, and succeeded in getting the post-office to use them. This revolutionised the whole business.” The coaches were built with steel springs, windows of great strength and lightness combined, boots for the baggage, seats for a few outside passengers, and a guard with a grand uniform, to protect the mail and stand for the dignity of his majesty’s government.
By the system of changing horses frequently great speed was attained, and the distance from Edinburgh to London, 400 miles, was made in 40 hours. Other lines of coaches, arranged to carry double the number of passengers outside than in, fourteen to six, were made heavier, and took the road more leisurely.
The carts and conveyances of the poor were cumbrous, heavy contrivances, without springs, mostly two-wheel, heavy carts.