Читать книгу Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks онлайн

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ssss1 “Honorius de Bellis wrote this inscription,—By chance or by labour,—round a lock composed of revolving rings graven with letters.”

This curious extract, which was brought forward by Mr. Chubb, in a paper on locks and keys (read before the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1850), seems to take away the credit from one (Regnier) with whose name the letter-lock has been most intimately associated. We shall presently explain, however, what it was that Regnier effected towards perfecting the letter-lock. In the meantime it may be interesting to note that the British Museum contains a copy of the work mentioned by Vanhagen. At the page indicated there is an engraving (a fac-simile of which is given in fig. 5) containing a drawing of a veritable puzzle or letter-lock; the lock consists of a cylinder or barrel, on which seven rings work; each of these rings is inscribed with letters, and the ends of the cylinder are grasped by a kind of shackle.

fig. 5. Puzzle-lock of the seventeenth century.