Читать книгу Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks онлайн

14 страница из 53

Mr. Yates, in a learned article on this subject in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, collects numerous details scattered through various early writers. We will string together a few of these details, so far as they have any relation to the fastenings of doors. The outer door of a Roman house was generally called janua; whereas the inner doors were called ostia. The doorway, when complete, consisted of four indispensable parts—the threshold or sill, the lintel, and the two jambs. The threshold, on which the feet trod, was often regarded with a kind of superstitious reverence; the lintel, which crossed the doorway at the top, having a considerable superincumbent weight to bear, was usually made of one piece of timber or stone of great strength; the jambs, or side uprights, were also made in one piece each. The doorway, in every building of the least importance, contained two doors folding together; even the internal doors had their bivalve construction. But in every case each of the two valves was wide enough to allow persons to pass through without opening the other; in some cases even each valve was double, so as to fold like our window-shutters. These doors, or valves, were not hinged to the side-posts, as with us, but were, as has already been stated, pivoted to the lintel above and the threshold below. The fastening usually consisted of a bolt placed at the base of each valve or half-door, so as to admit of being pushed into a socket made in the sill to receive it. The doorways in some of the houses at Pompeii still shew two holes in the sill, corresponding to the bolts in the two valves. At night, the front door of the house was further secured by means of a wooden and sometimes an iron bar placed across it, and inserted into sockets on each side of the doorway; hence it was necessary to remove the bar in order to open the door. Chamber-doors were often secured in the same manner. In the Odyssey there is mention of a contrivance (adverted to by Mr. St. John) for bolting or unbolting a door from the outside; it consisted of a leather thong inserted through a hole in the door, and by means of a loop, ring, or hook, capable of taking hold of the bolt so as to move it in the manner required. We have here evidently the elements of a more complete mechanism; for the bolt was a rude lock in the same degree that the thong was a rude key. That the Romans afterwards had real locks and keys is clear; for the keys found at Herculaneum and Pompeii, and those attached to rings, prove that a kind of warded lock must have been well known.ssss1 There are the remains of a tomb at Pompeii, the door of which is made of a single piece of marble, including the pivots, which were encased in bronze, and turned in sockets of the same metal; it is three feet high, two feet nine inches wide, and four and a quarter inches thick; it is cut in front to resemble panels, and thus approaches nearer in appearance to a modern wooden door; and it was fastened by some kind of lock, traces of which still remain.