Читать книгу Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks онлайн

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“I believe two wheels would make a perfectly safe lock; three would be quite so. I adopted four to make security doubly sure, as it would be impossible in any given time to work the changes. On two wheels by chance the lock might open; you can, however, calculate the chances against this; and also three or four, the false compartment on the outer rim being taken into calculation. ***

“If this lock is of any value, it should be known; if it has weak points, let them be pointed out, and they may admit of a remedy; for we ought not to be led to believe a lock is safe which is not so.”

In relation to the “first advantage” which Mr. Brown not unreasonably supposed to be possessed by his lock—viz. that “it cannot be picked, because it has no keyhole”—we shall have something to say in a future page, where certain fallacies on this subject will be noticed. In the meantime we may remark, that it is not a little creditable that a leading Liverpool merchant should have invented a lock worthy of occupying a position on his own safe for a quarter of a century; for we may be quite certain that he would not have allowed the lock to maintain that post of honour unless it had really (so far as experience had then gone) served worthily as a safeguard to his treasures. And if it were possible to collect all the by-gone specimens of lock-oddities, we should probably find among them many highly-ingenious letter-locks; for supposing a man to have a mechanical turn of mind, a lock is by no means an unworthy medium for displaying it; the pieces of metal are so small as to be easily manageable at a small work-bench in a small room. The fondness for this sort of employment evinced by the unfortunate Louis XVI. of France led to the common remark, “He is a capital locksmith, but a very bad king.”