The anti-theft lock, it took experts 16 days to pry open

The Bramah lock is a symbol of great security and is claimed to be impervious to theft even when opened .

Joseph Bramah and the challenge lock with the inscription "Any craftsman who can make a tool to open or pry this lock will immediately receive a reward of 200 Guineas. It will take 61 years to successfully pry it open. (Photo: Wikipedia Commons).

Bramah's interest in locks began in 1783, when he was elected a fellow of a newly formed organization: the Royal Society for the Promotion of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. [.] Understandably, Bramah attended most of the meetings of the Mechanical Branch and soon after joining, he became famous for a simple achievement: picking a lock.

It wasn't so simple: in September 1783, a certain Mr Marshall presented a lock that he claimed was unpickable, and a local expert named Truelove fiddled with it and a special basket of tools for an hour and a half before giving up. Then, from the back of the audience, Joseph Bramah stepped forward, quickly produced two tools, and opened the lock in just 15 minutes. The audience gasped: they were clearly a top-notch mechanic.

The British public was obsessed with locks. An unintended consequence of the social and legal changes sweeping through England in the late 18th century was a sharp social divide: while the aristocracy had for centuries lived in palatial homes, protected behind walls, gardens and moats, and tended by servants, the new business class lived in homes easily accessible to the poor.

They and their wealth were generally both visible and accessible, especially in the fast-growing cities; they lived mostly in houses and streets within easy reach of a large poor population. They were hated everywhere. Robberies were frequent. Fear pervaded the air. Doors and windows had to be locked. Locks had to be made and good.

A lock like Mr. Marshall's, which could be picked in 15 minutes by a skilled person, and perhaps in 10 minutes by a hungry and reckless man, was clearly not good enough. Joseph Bramah decided to design and build a better lock. He succeeded in 1784, less than a year after Marshall's. With this invention, a thief would have to give up, even with a wax-coated key, a tool much favored by criminals for locating the lever and tumbler inside a lock.

In Bramah's design, patented in August, the pins inside the lock rise and fall to new positions as the key is inserted and turned to release the latch, then return to their original positions when the latch is engaged. The result is a lock that is virtually tamper-proof, and no matter how much a thief fiddles with the wax key, they will never be able to locate the changed pins to release the latch.

Having determined the basic design, Bramah ingeniously and skillfully constructed a complete cylindrical lock, the pins of which did not rise and fall by gravity but moved in and out along the radius of the lock shaft, following the teeth of the key, and then returned to their original position by means of springs, one for each pin. In this way, the entire lock could be reduced to a small brass cylinder, which could be easily fitted into a tubular recess in a wooden door or safe, and the locking pin would lie flat against the outer edge of the door (when the lock was open) or enter a brass recess in the door frame (when the lock was closed).

Joseph Bramah's 'Challenge Lock' was first displayed in a window in Piccadilly, London.

[.] It was thanks to the lock that the name Bramah officially became part of the English vocabulary. Indeed, books still refer to the Bramah pen or the Bramah lock today - the Duke of Wellington wrote lines praising both inventions, as did Walter Scott and Bernard Shaw.

But the word Bramah on its own - as Dickens used it in his novels The Pickwick Papers , Sketches by Boz and The Uncommercial Traveller - suggests that to the Victorian public at least, his name was synonymous with his invention : use the Bramah key to open the Bramah lock, secure the house with the Bramah lock, and give the Bramah key to a close friend so that they can visit freely at any time. Only with the appearance of Mr Chubb and Mr Yale (first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1833 and 1869 respectively) did the dominance of the name Bramah come under attack.

[.] There was a man who had broken Joseph Bramah's lock, which had been waiting patiently in the window of the firm's showroom at 124 Piccadilly since 1790. This man, who also exhibited at the Great Exhibition, was a locksmith, a competitor of Bramah's, and an American by nationality. He had crossed the Atlantic with the intention of breaking all the 'unpickable' locks that the British engineers could put before him.

He was Alfred C. Hobbs , born in Boston in 1812, the son of an English couple. That had something to do with his burning desire to prove that American locks were superior to British ones.

[.] Hobbs wrote a formal letter to the Bramah firm, requesting an appointment in Piccadilly 'in connection with the notice in the window of your lock-picking'. Joseph Bramah had died 40 years earlier, and was probably confident to his death that no one would rise to his challenge. The firm was now managed by Bramah's sons, and it was they who received Hobbs's letter - with some trepidation at the fateful occasion, for they had heard of Hobbs's reputation. They had no choice but to agree, and a panel of experts was appointed to determine whether the lock - the precision mechanical legend of eighteenth-century England - had actually been picked and not broken.

And Hobbs succeeded. It took him a total of 51 hours, over 16 days, to lift the lock plate and declare it open, that is, he had picked it . He used a series of tiny tools, designed specifically for the purpose—including a tiny micro-screw attached to the wooden base on which the late Joseph Bramah had placed the lock. (If the lock had been placed on an impenetrable iron base, the tool would have been useless. It was screwed into the wooden base, allowing Hobbs to fiddle with the 2-inch cylinder while his device kept the 18 tiny tumblers inside the lock depressed.)

He also used a magnifying glass, in which tiny rays of light were reflected inside the cylinder by special mirrors. He used a tiny brass gauge to determine how deep each pin was depressed, and small hooks to pull out pins that were depressed too far. Beside him was a tray of instruments that looked like a surgeon's, minus the scalpel, for one purpose only: to pry open the Bramah lock, thereby affirming the superiority of American precision technology.

The Bramahs paid the promised reward , but they complained that the Americans' actions, with dozens of tools and 51 hours of tinkering, were not in the spirit of the unwritten challenge . No thief would spend that much time and effort on a lock.

The judges agreed. They found Hobbs's approach unfair, and - knowing full well that the 200 guineas had been awarded - concluded emphatically: "Hobbs, in all his scrupulousness, has not discredited the reputation of the Bramah lock; on the contrary, his efforts have confirmed that it is practically impregnable."

The 200 guineas then sat proudly in the Crystal Palace for weeks. Alfred Hobbs basked in his victory, claiming the gold was a testament to his achievement. But it was a short-lived victory, and as the judges noted, the break in the Bramah lock had no negative impact on the firm's business: people lined up to buy the lock that took an expert 16 days to pick.

Bramah still operates in London and sells locks all over the world, all based on Joseph Bramah's 1797 prototype. Meanwhile, Day & Newell of New York went out of business shortly after the Great Exhibition. Its parautoptic permutation lock was soon picked, and easily picked with a wooden stick. The man who succeeded in picking the lock was the heir to a new precision lock company and the founder of a company that is now part of the world's largest lock manufacturer, Linus Yale .