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Besides wards, there have been numerous other contrivances for adding to the security of locks—including screws, escutcheons, spiral springs, wheel-and-pinion work, alarums, and multiple bolts. As these are not of sufficient importance to be treated in separate chapters, we shall here give just so much notice of them as will illustrate their general character. Some of them are found combined with the “tumbler” principle, presently to be described; but all of them, it is now well known, were employed in various, ways when the tumbler lock was but little understood, and when the warded lock was held in esteem.

The Marquis of Worcester, whose curious Century of Inventions, written nearly two hundred years ago, contains so many suggestions which ingenuity has since developed into practical completeness, gives four of his inventions in the following words:—

69. “A way how a little triangle screwed key, not weighing a shilling, shall be capable and strong enough to bolt and unbolt, round about a great chest, an hundred bolts, through fifty staples, two in each, with a direct contrary motion; and as many more from both sides and ends; and, at the self-same time, shall fasten it to the place beyond a man’s natural strength to take it away; and in one and the same turn both locketh and openeth it.