The Man Who Picked Victorian London's Unpickable Lock | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Picked Victorian London's Unpickable Lock

mentalfloss.com

123 pointsbenbreen19 comments

The first half of the 19th century was the "iron era" of impregnable safes. With enough iron, you could make something that would effectively resist physical attack. Explosives weren't powerful enough yet - dynamite, nitroglycerine, TNT, and C4, let alone shaped charges, were in the future. Black powder would just leave scorch marks. Acetylene torches and thermic lances hadn't been developed yet. High speed steel drill bits didn't exist yet. Cobalt, carbide, tungsten, and diamond tools were a century away. Power tools required a nearby steam engine. Hammer and chisel was about it, and banging on cold iron with cold iron is a very slow process.

Theft from safes thus focused on lock-picking and getting hold of the keys. The latter was usually more effective.[1]

I can't find a picture on line of the setup used to pick Bramah's lock, but I've seen a drawing. The lock design was much like today's round bike locks - push-down pins. There's an easy way to open those today using a Bic pen cap.[2] Modern ones are just pin tumbler locks in a different form factor. Bramah's lock was a lever lock in round form. Hobbs used a custom-made picking setup with a thumbscrew and calibrated dial for each lever. This allowed setting any combination of depths and reproducing it later. Now exhaustive search was possible. Hobbs took most of a month to do the job. It wasn't really a useful attack, but it shook people up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gold_Robbery [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LahDQ2ZQ3e0

This link explains how the lock worked and discusses picking techniques, though not Hobbs' methods specifically. I vaguely remember reading that his equipment included a device to apply a small torque to the cylinder, via a lever arm with a short pendulum on its end. Any movement of the cylinder as a slot aligned with the shear line ring was revealed by the swinging of the pendulum.

The use of shallow decoy slots indicate that Bramah had anticipated this form of attack, but they only served to delay the solution.

http://crypto.com/photos/misc/bramah/

I feel left hanging after reading the article. It doesn't really detail much at all about how Hobbs was able to pick the locks.

Further, Mental Floss itself seems to have in place one of those "you can't click back" mechanisms that spams your back button history.

I usually overcome such mechanisms on Chrome by holding down the back arrow until the list of past pages comes up, then going back to the page just before the last one.

>Writing of the Bramah breach in 1851, Living Age magazine wondered what would become of a population that could no longer rely upon locks to protect their material goods: “The best substitute for the lock on the safe," the author wrote, "is honesty in the heart.”

I've wondered this after extensive travels through Asia - is there a way to prescribe how to change your culture to make thievery rare simply by making it culturally unacceptable? Perhaps there are other reasons Tokyo's petty crime rate is so low compared to other major cities (legal system, welfare system, education system), but I feel that all those reasons come down to the same root reason - a culture.

Japanese will do bad things when they are sure they can get away with them. You won't get away with stealing. There are police everywhere (in a good way to be honest), and they will catch a thief.

According to this link ... http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2010/03/yakuza-and-e... ... it's not the police that lower petty crime rates but rather the Yakuza gangs working as enforcement-for-hire.

The claim there is very specific ("In the neighborhoods where they're running businesses or collecting protection money, you won't see people getting mugged because the yakuza don't want people to be afraid to come there and spend money") and doesn't make much sense in the context of things like the Economist's article As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do:

THE stake-out lasted a week, but it paid off in the end. The tireless police of Kagoshima, a sleepy city in the far south of the country, watched the unlocked car day and night. It was parked outside a supermarket, and contained a case of malt beer. Finally, a passing middle-aged man decided to help himself. Five policemen instantly pounced, nabbing one of the city’s few remaining law-breakers.

and

Even yakuza gangsters, once a potent criminal force, have been weakened by tougher laws and old age.

https://www.trendiee.com/news/crimes-dried-pretty-officer/

This gels with my experience. Aichi police cracked down on Yakuza in the last ten years especially. Having said that, An acquaintance (bar owner) in Shinjuku openly told me last year that he was worried that some day they would show up and demand protection money.

I'm thinking of the heist sequence in Miike's Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha :)

> Patented in 1818, the Detector spent decades as one of England’s greatest assurances. Whatever valuables lay beyond the lock were guaranteed to remain safe and secure, immune to even the most sophisticated or skilled attempts at a breach.

When transported to the current day conceptions around the strength of cryptography, this particular line makes me also think of Dr. Janek's line from Sneakers, where while discussing the virtues of encryption, he says:

> The numbers are so unbelievably big, all the computers in the world could not break them down. But maybe, just maybe, there's a shortcut.

Not that I hope we find a shortcut any time soon, but time has a way of letting us discover interesting shortcuts, be they lockpicking strategies or prime number weaknesses.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the 99% Invisible podcast's "Perfect Security" episode. It covers a lot of the same information, and is a good listen.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/perfect-security/

This is apparently a Brahma lock key: https://img0.etsystatic.com/113/0/11210336/il_fullxfull.9705...

(or at least a replication of one)

Which I found interesting because it suggests the 'tube' key was well known in the 19th century and all this time I thought it was a 20th century invention.

Matt Blaze opened up a Bramah lock in 2003.

http://www.crypto.com/photos/misc/bramah/

To clarify: he disassembled a Bramah lock and explained how it works, but did not pick open the lock. He provides some theoretical ways in which it could be picked (aside from the brute-force strategy apparently adopted by Hobbs).

Too bad the article doesn't have more technical details on how the locks worked and how it was picked.

As usual, there is an excellent 99% Invisible episode: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/perfect-security/

I can't link to YT right now because I'm on filtered internet. That said look up Schyler Towne. He gives a phenomenal talk about the great lock debacle of the 19th century and the history of locks all the way back into antiquity.

This does anticipate the anxieties that we feel about cryptography in the modern age so closely!

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