> 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.