In July 1851, an American locksmith named Alfred Charles Hobbs sat down in an upstairs room at Joseph Bramah’s Piccadilly shop with a padlock that had hung in the window for 61 years, beneath a standing offer of 200 guineas to anyone who could open it without the key. The lock, made in 1790, was considered unpickable. Hobbs opened it in 51 hours of work across 16 days. Two days before, he had picked Chubb’s Detector lock, the benchmark of secure…
This story is only covered by news sources that have yet to be evaluated by the independent media monitoring agencies we use to assess the quality and reliability of news outlets on our platform. Learn more here.