Unlucky In Locks

Skyler Locker hey everybody thanks um so so as to make use of all the time that I have available to me I'm going to go ahead but occasionally you might see the stupid thing pop up on the screen I apologize about that um so this is unlucky and locks the whole idea of this presentation is that I want to put forward a bunch of interesting locks that you've probably never heard of um and at the end I'll talk about an interesting project that I'm working on um the idea all the way around is that these are manufacturers or concepts or whatever else that for the most part no longer exist anymore um thank you aesome

um that no longer exist anymore for one reason or another um that isn't actually attributable to luck of course we'll talk a little bit about what's going on with all of them so I'm Skyler town uh uh so you can find pretty much everything that I do at lock. GD um I pronounce it lock God uh you can pronounce it however you like uh it's also my personal URL shortener um but I just have a passing through to my stuff now I've also recently been named a research scholar at the Ronin Institute they are a nonprofit that provides institutional support to academics who might not have traditional institutional support um so people doing independent research that their own institutions or

in my case uh I have never had an institution um so I'm pretty excited to have some sort of backing for some of the more interesting work that I do these days big fan of R Institute Ron institute. uh I'm also at shoebox on Twitter and in general just Skyler town on the internet uh there is one of me as best I can tell so we're going to talk about some locks and some keys we're going to have some fun um this right off the bat I actually can't remember the name of this lock um I found out about this at a conference in Holland a couple of years ago uh great guy named Peter

field giving a really fascinating talk about all sorts of mechanical security he's one of the uh uh director level folks at Medico um really interesting guy it's the wine of the security industry as he's been described to me so what's going on here here in this patent is that we have your normal pin Tumbler lock with just a normal flat uh top of the key pin bottom of the driver pin and over here we have the whole concept of this patent there's a little cup on the inside of the key pin and there is the corresponding um you know con cave portion in the driver pin they have to sink up to one another and then slide

out of position uh and this just makes it a little more confusing to pick add some interesting variability to the to the lock um the concept again really simple here are your driver pins here are your key pins they meet in one another and it makes it more difficult to make more difficult to feel your way through Rue uh however the patent also gives specifications for master keying uh now specifications for master keying are great and it makes it much more extensible and it opens up to a much wider Market as far as the um business of this company is concerned however in practice the very small Master Wafers that have to be in this cup and ball

positioning occasionally get inverted uh through regular use because they're small enough that they can actually rotate freely um with enough like forcing and repeated use of the key getting bounced around inside and so on and so forth um so they're finding that some are actually just becoming inverted leaving nice like big gaps and places where you could uh much more easily manipulate them and then even worse um actually just getting into situations where they were becoming such a confounded and twisted position so that they were breaking the lock um and making it no longer usable for the normal key um unlucky so that doesn't exist anymore okay this one you'll probably at least have heard of the primary company here

Medico um at one point in time they got into a legal fight with mhart I'm going to explain both Technologies here mhart was pretty awesome and they no longer exist anymore and we'll explain what happened don't worry about all of this text the important thing is that Lois L and Superman are in a fight so medal locks uh the keys are cut to angles the pins have chiseled tips so that as you insert the key into the lock the tip of the key pin will actually Orient itself to the different angles as we go along they have large gashes cut out of the side of them that a sidebar can drop into and we'll put this all

together into uh one image provided to me by a guy goes by the handle JK the cjer John King's done some really awesome work attacking Medico so here are the angled cuts of our key here's our chisel tipped pin and we can also see the channel cut into the side of the pin this is very important because the teeth of the sidebar are actually going to marry directly into that here we see them oriented in different directions with the proper key inserted into the lock they're all oriented in exactly the same way so to pick this you have to both lift and rotate the pins it adds another dimension to the scaring makes it much

more difficult to open M har also has angles cut into the keys but rather than a channel cut down the side of the key pin their pins interlock with one another it's actually a dovetail joint between the key pin and the driver pin now this is particularly cool for a couple of reasons we'll get into but just mechanically it's really beautiful idea this is with the incorrect key inserted into the lock some of them are rotated out of position so they couldn't separate from each other even if they were at the right position on the sheer line um this one is at the right position on the she join and rotated correctly this one is

rotated correctly but at the wrong position so it also couldn't separate with the correct key inserted they are all aligned in the right direction and they can travel in a channel cut into the plug of the lock where it can rotate freely so Medico uh the security elements are differentiated what I mean by that is that the sidebar mechanism is its own physical idea it's own in its own physical space and then you have the sheer line that you also have to deal with setting dep to the correct Heights so because they're differentiated because they're not actually part of the same Movement we can break that down and attack only one of those elements at a

time now the reason that you can pick a lock whatsoever is because of a ton of small differences in the various components of that lock so one pin will bind before another pin because it's slightly ooid or this pin chamber isn't perfectly deerred or whatever the case may be that's why you can pick a lock because we can deal one pin at time because all these mechanical imperfections take that a step further and we have a differentiated um series of security elements inside of a lock when we apply tension to the cylinder we will either bind the sidebar first or we will bind the shear line first and what this means is that we can lift everything to the

proper height and get the sheer line completely settled and then we'll actually get a rotation out of the plug lock that sidebar into the sides of the pins and then be able to rotate the pin so we can take it one thing at a time really break down our attack and only de one element at a time however in the M heart these are actually two Integrated Security elements because of that dovetail joint you have to both lift and rotate the PIN to the right position in order to have it open in order to have it turn whatsoever you have to do both at once you have to do both at once you have to lift and rotate it this makes it

dramatically more secure than the basic Medico now these days and uh and for quite a while now Medico had a what's called a driverless cam lock and in the driverless cam lock there are no driver pins whatsoever it's the driverless it has only key pins and rather than having a solid channel in those key pins there are holes drilled at different heights with that you have to both lift and rotate perfectly it's an integrated uh two Integrated Security system so medo actually has a great solution to this these days and it's a great lock they've done some interesting things but at the time M was really swinging for the fence was coming up with something really cool

but because of that rotational element because of that exist whatsoever medo went out and suit their pants off so um even at the time there uh's a good book on um there's a good book just describing all the means for securing physical properties uh it describes medo and mhart as part of the same class but then goes into another few sentences of depth on what I've described here saying how difficult it is to even perform the basic operations manipulation on the empire versus the Medico so uh Medico sued they get royalties and eventually mhart had to roll up their manufacturing Al together um every lock that art produced for a long period of time they

were feeding royalties back out to Medico 4 and eventually um Corbin uh just rolled up the m security line Al together so these just don't exist anymore whatsoever um if you find them get your hands on them it's one of the coolest high security American locks that no longer exists whatsoever um but that's Medico that's so uh similarly quickit versus schlake this is another situation where um there being enough imitation led to a laws suit which rolled it up we'll get into some other unlucky situations later but um these are our combatants we have Rex the wonderdog and some sort of cougar so the quick set smart key is another very interesting lock um quicket

gets a lot of crap and I get a lot of crap for being really interested in quicket lately um I was in a recent Twitter fight about this as a matter of fact uh but I I've got these on my house do me not to figure out how to take them as soon as I put any twk all on everything find up they're significantly difficult to pick they actually are um so this guy Walt ster if you look at his patent history it goes faucet faucet faucet faucet quicket SMY um he was working in the Home Hardware division of Black and Decker who own quicket and wiser up in Canada uh and at some point in time he's

transferred to the home security team and quicket had been the joke of the security industry for time in Memorial as far as my time in Lockport is concerned um they are like the practice lock that people suggested you go out and pick so Walt rolls in and one of the first things he does is he like Googles the company uh and he sees what their reputation is like on the internet and he's he's like oh man people sure are pick going to bump in our locks like crazy let's make a new lock that's revolutionary that's a revolutionary idea as ridiculous as that sounds but I mean you look at even companies like multi-lock multi-lock iterate faster than almost anybody in

the industry an Israeli company or an Israeli high security company and they recently came out with the uh I believe it's the multilock X5 something like that it's added this tertiary locking mechanism they have a pin in pin system they have an interactive element on that and now they've added a slider based system on top of all of the rest of that very high security El very difficult to pick some researchers in Holland and Germany were going back and forth with the company over the course of maybe a year maybe 18 months uh this is tool and SSD for those of you that know the major groups in Europe and Tool of course represented here in America as well um

and they uh they were iterating so rapidly they went through you know three major revisions to the product going back and forth of these security researchers even they Des by iterating so rapidly have never thrown the core locking concept and started something from scratch which is what quick set W St we're doing here now they have a lot of inspiration this goes back to the reala the U change the riala in particular that's r i e l d a which was from the '70s I guess never got much traction honestly riala and and U change are probably the really unlucky ones in this scenario um you'll still see some U change installed especially at some of

the major malls Across America um but quick set rolled in did this in a really elegant way basing it on a lot of prior work um and have done a lot of good things with it except that they made it out of terrible metal we'll talk about that in a second okay here's how it works after all that ya the very cool thing about the quick set smart key is that each of the elements inside the sidebar Wafers and the pins are all exactly the same as one another so usually differentiation in the lock comes down to differences in the heights of ke pins the length of your key pin corresponds directly to the cuts in your

key the deeper the cut in your key the longer your key pin in this case the differentiation comes down to where in the sidebar wafer your key pin is interlocked so every key pin is exactly the same every sidebar wafer is exactly the same it's just that this series of serations will determine with wherever your PIN interacts with on the series serations will determine the height of the cut in your key and that is a differentiation which also allows for repeting and Cool Stuff uh this is the sidebar so this is now a sidebar based lock generally generally if you have a sidebar based lock it's already a step up from your casual pin Tumbler lock um

and these along here this this this this this are where these sidebar legs will fit into so uh this is on the uh interior of this Carriage that is attached to the lock these are these the uh serrations that your PIN will swap into this is just the other side of that same Carriage with the sidebar set into its position now this sidebar will sit between the carriage in the plug of the lock and the housing of the lock and that's the reason that you can't rotate this because that is sticking out and has to be able to just press in to the plug a block into those Gates that we were just looking at before the whole

system can rotate and now we have the pins again these are all the same total height but as they're positioned by key these Tabs are at different positions those tabs been marry directly into these sidebar Wafers and that defines what sort of key will work in this so all of this together is sort of in this Carriage which can be pushed offline so when you turn the key 90° you can insert a small Tool Push this entire mechanism back it'll be held in place by a by a Dun you remove the key you put a new key in and what is happening is that this is pin and this is our sidebar wafer and this

is where they're married in to begin with when we push the carriage offline and remove the key the pin drops down to its lowest possible level put a new key in it's raised up to whatever level the cut on that new key will raise it up to we rotate it all back these Lo Interlock in the new position and you've re keed it the old key will no longer work the new key will now work and definitely until you decide to re ke again it's a really clever mechanism really well implemented really easy to Rey um but that said they made it out of Pop metal um they made it out of terrible materials to keep it really inexpensive

when this came out despite being higher security for a number of things um this is Bump proof uh this is incredibly difficult to pick uh Walt ster actually sent this to Japan which is one of the few countries in the world that actually does any sort of manipulation resistance testing um to give grades on it made it through two rounds of high security pick testing um and is considered a high security uh block for that one test um you also their first line when they came out could be opened with forcing by a screwdriver um so again they implemented a really clever idea into uh really terrible materials Master Lock recently did the same thing with their uh Speed

Lock which I don't have slides of but can talk about in the hallway it's amazing mechanism and you can open it with security screwdrivers so uh schlag uh came out with a remarkably similar product it is reable uh it's similar but not exactly the same it's reable um and the main difference is that instead of having that sliding Carriage it has a pivoting carriage so the way that they separate pin from sidebar Wafers is to Pivot The Carriage offline instead of sliding the carriage back at which point we can Rey it with another key um the big advantage of this system is that you didn't need a sec a separate tool to push that carriage back you

needed a different type of key so you're always dealing with keys instead of ever dealing with a little bit of metal um interestingly though these conceptually should be bump proof they were made so poorly that you could bump them um you could bump them into the change position and then Rey somebody's lock at will um guy named farmer freak demonstrated this on YouTube bump and locks very rapidly and the reason is because while uh while quick set on their sidebar Wafers provided a series of serrations to make them more difficult to pick and that also confound the bumping PRS the again this isn't traditional bumping this is just that these are smooth on one side

and the sidebar is rounded so so if you just keep whacking the key until the sidebar gets close enough to the sidebar wafer and those sidebar Wafers can move freely because they're not serrated eventually the sidebar will drop into place and it'll open freely sidebar locks in general probably shouldn't really be all that bumpable uh but farmer freak bumped the hell out of these farmer freak also Built My Favorite attack of 2010 against the quick set smart key where he was actually able with uh with a like a scope with a with a powerful light and a scope uh he built I don't know why I don't have a slide of this okay it's really simple uh

he took a blank for a quick set he milled out the inside of it and then at a 45° angle uh just before the tip of the key which was still solid at a 45° angle he polished a mirror into the brass he then mounted a light right here and as he put it into the lock raising everything up to its highest position he could see where the pin was interacting with with the sidebar wafer he could see where that connection was and actually just name the cuts of the key as he inserted it and Visually decoded it um it was Stellar uh guy by the handle of Valex built a similar system uh physically um decoding it with a

small metal flag that would count the number of uh serration in that sidebar wafer before you got to a pin um I I think that it lends Credence to the to the like interesting and security level of lock you have to come up with crazy attacks against it um so it's totally defeated but it's still a really cool lock and if your mom is looking for a new lock I suggest that you make her get the quick set smarty hell if you have a residential property and you don't want to put bars on the Windows anyway the defeats against this are primarily force and they can break the window and unlock from the inside just as easily as they

can crank it around and rip it out of your lock so it's a cool lock for its Market anyway quicket sues um they accuse schlag of infringing on two parts of their specific patent um and they accuse them of false advertising the false advertising is actually the part that I find most interesting um schlag explicitly claimed that their loock was 10 times more secure than any of their competitors um and being that it was yeah being that it was not only based on the quick set idea which of course in turn was based on riela back in the day but can also be bumped and have literally ignored portions of the security that quicket paid attention to

um it's it's clearly a fairly fraudulent clim um schlag put out a press release standing behind its product and statements ready to vigorously defend its rights etc etc um and of course uh it was off the market by December of 2011 by court order um pulled from the shelves completely pulled off um and in this case quick set is the L du uh name so uh we're going to talk about Norman Epstein Norman Epstein is um Norman Epstein was uh a genuine mechanical genius uh his lock designs are a revelation um and this is a very different sort of lock Norman was never sued out of business whatsoever his lock designs are absolutely incredible they

were heralded as high security at their time and yet you will find none of them in production you will find none of them anywhere right now all right so uh this is the one that went into full production that was actually installed places and the sold the trade shows and so on and so forth it's really cool lock we'll get into the interior in a minute but I want to show you just a few of the patents of Norman Epstein that I found while patent diving um this is for a really clever and this is this is defeatable but it's a really clever idea that'll kind of clue you into what he's going to be doing in the rest of his

career so this is a sesame lock and sesame locks are the ones with you know you all great this little push button that was going to be important in a minute you'll see why so if we look inside of this uh so this is a side view now and this is the these are the you know guys rotating so usually in a sesame lock you'll see an inner wheel that has some sort of uh passive sidebar or something like that in this case however the actual wheel that you're manipulating has an active element um and that's C change from the normal realm of Sesame locks really clever idea so what's going on here is that each of the wheels has a

toggle in it and these have a little bit of movement available to them on either side as they pass by each other they just move out of each other's way because they have enough room to however oh here's the toggle sorry moving in One Direction or the other there it is in place and when we align them all they'll all push out as much as they can but because they're now all in alignment it creates a longer total space than they're usually doing as they're passing around and it is enough that they are you actually will push up on this plunger which will shove the entire line against this spring decoupling this locking dog from the

shackle it's really clever and I am confident that none of you have ever seen anything like it and if if I am wrong about that I want desperately to talk to you um because this is one of the cooler things that I ever seen and it got me obsessed with Norman Epstein so um this is another locking concept uh also utilizing ball bearings but now we have a pin based lock um so each of the pins has sort of a school shape there are no drivers in this this is once again a driverless pin tumber lock so these are only key pins but each of the key pins has a spool taken out at the

top of it that a ball bearing can ride in and the ball bearing only has a limited amount of space to turn because it can't actually get into the the fullness of the housing of each of the pins so when the pins are misaligned the ball bearings have enough room to move seeing the last one we can probably see what's about to happen when we insert the key they are all now in alignment and it is just creating the longest version of that line which pushes against the spring and this is the cool part because it isn't it isn't like in the last one where it's decoupling something in this case it is actually creating a coupling between the plug of

the lock and the cam of the lock now the cam of the lock is what will connect to the bolt or the uh uh thing like aolt uh the sprung going to walk away from that okay so uh but that's this is the part that does the actual unlocking um and so without the key inserted in fact let's go back just to demonstrate this without the key inserted there's actually nothing attached to the cam so you can do whatever you want to everything in here you are not going to be able to hold anything at its sheer line because the ball bearings will physically the ball bearings and the Springs will physically Force themselves back at you

when we pick a lock I often say that we're reproducing the action of the key one pin at a time you cannot reproduce the action of the key one pin at a time in this you have to reproduce every pin at the same time this is the full integration of every single pin in the lock every pin in the lock is fully integrated into a single movement at the end of the keys full insertion and picking this is is far from trivial I do not know of this actually being produced actually being brought to Market I don't know a physical version of this there might be out there so this piece here is what we'll

actually interlock once the key is inserted and all the ball bearings are um at the right level and now the whole system can turn and the cam will actually be rotated and we'll pull that Bol so now we get on to the actual lock that came into production this I believe is from Popular Mechanics an article about uh the Norman lock uh so it has this very cool curved key with some interestingly cut angles in it uh goes into the side there and we've already seen Norman approach combination based locks we've seen him approach pin based locks we've seen him uh decouple a locking dog from a shackle we've seen him couple we've seen him work with what

I call Cam separation which is a really cool concept and a lot of people do it really terribly right now especially in electronic locks if you ever come up to a door and you can turn the handle without anything happening then you input your code how you authenticate however you do and then the handle engages that's Cam separation the handle until you authenticate is separated from the cam of the lock you can often bypass those with a strong magnet or a soft Mallet and just bridge the gap to the cam directly avoiding the authentication Al together and open up the lock cam separation we see it all the time it's been a problem for a long time and very

few people implemented correctly and that particular rant more about Norman Epstein so what's going on here is really cool now he's actually approaching disc Rainer locks so a third completely different um locking concept that he is now applying the and it's the same he's working with the same idea across a number of already known mechanical locking uh uh ideas so in this case the ball bearings are now being carried in these discs as you can see right here now each of these where they are positioned in each of the discs will be different and we'll see the the variation in this cutout in each of the discs each of the discs has a spacer between it um and

then we have the ball bearings acting as dis what a normal diser would have as a sidebar if you haven't seen a lot of diser locks I have a lot of information about them you can track them down and compare it after the fact Let it to be known to you by me that this is very clever and not something that you've seen in other dis locks so um same idea we've seen it before as these come around into alignment as the key rotates them all so that all the bar ball bearings line up it pushes into here and this Bridges a gap into the cam of this lock which would otherwise been freely now the cam can turn and and so he's

Incorporated all those ideas into what is now you'll also notice that except for this one spring in the very back of the lock there are no other Springs most diser locks have no springs they're often uh used in the railroad industry in America that's one of the places that you'll see them because they survive just without anything being shoved into them because there are no springs they just are brutal turning bastards that will do anything that your key tells it to do and muscle their way through a lot so at the time it was being compared to um the fé which is this amazing French lock um which had its own problem you can sort of see here that this is in

the shape of an I beam now putting a key in the shape of an ibeam makes it incredibly strong in this case rather than ball bearings these guys had two brass side bars so if you put a bar of metal through this and it torqued over and over again you would actually just Shear those sidebars off because the key was so strong that you could overpower it with its own key well with its own key or with the blank Keys usually have the attack go with white key you wouldn't do it with it own key unlock it yeah so it was being compared favorably against one of the highest security and foreign locks in the world by people

like Popular Mechanics and other people um unfortunately the pragmatic law company which is Norman's law company that was producing the locks he always produced these independently with his own Lock Company um they rolled up they went out of business they didn't contract with any of the major manufacturers and I don't know the exact causes but the fact that while he was producing amazing locks the globalization of the mechanical security industry was going had full force and that he continued to produce independently rather than throwing his lot in with Asa abloy or kavas yes um do you know if his IP belongs to his estate or if it's been bought off by very good question I have no idea that's a really

good question I would love to know the answer to that um so sadly he's dead um and he is very well remembered by the people in the community that knew him I absolutely never did um but on like real locksmithing forums at antique locks.com which are just a bunch of awesome old codas that know a lot about locks more than I will ever know and I'm gleaning as much information from them as I can as possible um I mean there are stories of him bringing a a fishbowl full of sand and and that would be his display at uh one of the major lock smithing uh conventions and when somebody would come up to talk to him he would pull his lock

out of this thing of sand shake the sand out of it put the key in it would work perfectly every time um just to demonstrate how like hearty it was how strong it was um so we lost a real mechanical genius and right now his IP is linguish lering um yeah what last Epstein Norman Epstein when did he pass away few years ago now probably sometime between like 7 and 12 years I don't have an obituary for him I would love to um I'm obsessed with him but I've been obsessed with his mechanical designs and I'm only now starting to dig into his life because I'd like to know more about him as a person

all right so Henry Robinson Town who is vaguely related to me uh had this great line um few I know putting all this text on the screen thank you very much um but I'm going to read it and it's going to be really exciting few self-respecting professional inventors have felt their mission to be fulfilled until they have invented a lock of some kind apparently there is a Fascination in the subject which they cannot resist however complete their ignorance of the past achievements and present developments of the art and so each in continently proceeds to invent things which while new to his untutored mind are usually already well-known occasionally in successful use but more frequently long

since consigned to the limbo of useless and discarded schemes this was how he began on his tretis for how to make locks um and he's right everybody was inventing locks in the 1800s for some reason everybody's just obsessed with this um so this is a guy that went by the name Dillingham um joh Dillingham he was from Maine he made some press briefly when he figured out how to grow mberry trees in the high arid climbs of uh the hills of Maine because Maine had a bounty for silk worms because we were trying to reduce our dependence on foreign silk which was the big problem well before reducing our dependence on foreign oil um and so there was a bounty

on silk worms this guy figured out he and a couple of Partners figured out how to grow mulberry trees in the high a climbs um of of Maine uh but he also invented blck uh this is the key it is in three parts what he says about this is that even with the key one might find himself baffled to operate even with the use of this as proper key because his lock was literally so confusing that his goal was bafflement even if you had the key for it um so what's going on is that so two of these key holes are actually false and will'll do nothing if you put anything into them um I don't remember the order

but how this goes is that when you lock the lock at the end of your night with the master key with one end of that key you insert it you turn 180° at which point you can insert it deeper turn another 180° at which point covers will go over all of the keyholes so you then need to reverse that process just to remove the keyholes then there are two differentiated bolt mechanisms manipulated by different portions of the key um and this goes on and on and on I have a long write up on it um but I can disate it some some point in time um but it is one of the most amazingly elaborate locks that I've ever seen a

patent for that just goes on endlessly and then just completely fails to explain the unnumbered uh unused just have to infer that those are completely useless um you can honey yes you can um anyway so uh so all this is to say is that everybody even even this guy that was desperately trying to get those silk worms growing the the re M silk worms only eat mberry leaves that's the situation there I expain that's as much as I know about silk if it doesn't relate to Locks I probably don't know anything about it okay so why why was everybody doing this um and there are just endless stories but I don't have a whole lot of time to

talk about more and more of these just hundreds of lock patents that probably never made it into actual production ever um and and and it's interesting because there was this incredible culture of invention during this period of time um and a lot locks were this one thing where you weren't just competing against nature like in figuring out how to get mold greine trees to grow in a place where they're not supposed to grow or uh there was a huge like huge like rush and land rush to create a machine that could head and and cut that could cut and flatten a head onto a nail in a single motion um and when that was solved people made the

equivalent of millions of dollars they made their fortunes cutting and heading Nails because they is a set problem to solve but in the case of locks you're not competing against a machine you're not competing against nature you're competing against every other clever human being in the world and while you can create the perfect machine to cut and head and nail and maybe someday some'll be able to innovate a little beyond that to make the process easier cheaper whatever in the case of a lock you are fighting the endless and unattainable battle for perfect security so the reason the town is so Furious in his tiate before he gives us Trea us on how to make locks is because he and the

other people in his industry that are really good at this are in the midst of a lifelong if not multigenerational struggle to achieve this unattainable goal in town in particular is one of the last people in the world that was out there saying listen you can pick my lock I just make it better than most other people you can pick anyone I just make it better than most other people sadly with his death the the Yale literature changed dramatically town was of the Yale Town company l junr so Dyan had another patent D him had another patent uh which is now known as 413 X the X means that it is an X patent when the pattent office burned

down in 1836 those of you that are patent office fire Scholars will know that this was the fire of 1877 um Place burned a lot uh this one however they recovered everything in 1836 when it burned it was actually all the patents were being stored in a temporary shelter as they built a fireproof patent office and we lost huge swaps of our industrial history um so 41 36x was completely unrecovered we have no information whatsoever on John dillan's Lock whatsoever um maybe it was the one that he would later submit in the 1860s of the lock that you're just looking at maybe that was just a reissue of the same um but we don't know what that is I

presently am engaged in a project to restore as much of those unlucky inventors pack to the patent record um this is I launched this at uh um Bon right after Source Boston a few weeks ago um and I have a couple of great volunteers that are helping me out with the project so it's x.l. GD x. loock g um this is what it looks like right now uh this is just the bare bones Twitter bootstrap to provide some information um just put up our first early returns describing the function of a lock that had not previously been fully recovered we had images of it and we had a scan of a of the letters patent we had a single

image and the scan of letters patent that never been transcribed um so we nearly fully transcribed it we're able to recover enough information about it then I'm actually building a 3D model of it presently uh which will then have 3D printed and so on and so forth so we're not just yes can you then put that information back into the patent office so the we don't I don't yet know what the Paton office will accept as Canon I believe that at the very least direct transcripts of their ter able scans should go back into the patent office and should actually be made publicly available now there are other situations where I'm finding detailed descriptions of how the locks worked but not the

actual letters patent and I have no idea if they have any mechanism for disseminating that information along with the patent so we'll restore whatever we can to the patent office but I'm also going to build this out as a project not just as the call to action that it is now but also a way to explore not just the mechanical nature of the locks in that were lost to this fire but also the lives of the people involved um the family histories everything and make it explorable uh this is actually why I began learning to code about eight weeks ago I finally began learning to code fifth attemp in my life but it's going really well um so I'm learning python

I'm really enjoying it um and I want to build this out into like I I want to have an API for the Lost locks of the of the patent fire I want people to be able to pull down as much information as possible and and do as deep a dive as possible um right now just collecting information um if you want to help out there are a ton of ways to do it x.l. GD hit me up we have a public zodo page where all of the research as it pours in is publicly available to anybody to pour over if they want to and then I'll be doing curation after we get through the data Dum phase on on everything else

okay so um thank you all very much this has nothing to do with anything I just think it's really funny um lock. GD to get to me x.l. GD to get to the project @ shoebox on Twitter um this is mostly just a fun talk about a bunch of locks that you're never going to hear about anywhere else for the most part um but this is the sort of stuff that I find really fascinating um and hopefully the xlock project is going to reveal even more in crazy acks as we go along so thank you all very

much