It is 1790, and you find yourself at 124 Piccadilly, London. As you stroll past the rows of shops, one window in particular catches your eye. Behind the glass of the Bramah Locks Company sits an unusual device — a lock that looks little like a modern padlock, but more formidable. Beneath it, a bold sign declares:
“The artist who can make an instrument that will pick or open this lock shall receive 200 guineas the moment it is produced.”
Over the years, hundreds of locksmiths—each confident in their craft—tried their hand at the challenge, yet all failed. This was the Bramah lock — a mechanical marvel that would remain unpicked for 67 years.
The Bramah Challenge Lock, now in the Science Museum in London. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Bramah lock was the creation of Joseph Bramah, an English inventor best remembered for developing the hydraulic press.
Joseph Bramah was born Joe Bremmer on April 13, 1749, in the village of Stainborough near Barnsley, Yorkshire, to a farmer and his wife. He was expected to inherit and run the family farm, but an accident at age sixteen left him lame and unable to continue the demanding work. Turning instead to woodworking, he apprenticed with a carpenter, mastering cabinetry and joinery. After completing his apprenticeship, he moved to London and established his own carpentry and cabinetmaking business.
Bremmer was a naturally inventive man, always seeking improvements to everyday mechanisms. While installing toilets for clients, he grew dissatisfied with the existing valve system and set about redesigning it. In 1778, he patented his own improved flushing mechanism. During the patent process, he changed his name from Joe Bremmer to Joseph Bramah, believing the new name sounded more refined and professional.
By 1784, Bramah had turned his attention to locks, founding the Bramah Locks Company. His designs were remarkably sophisticated, offering security far beyond anything available from his contemporaries. As demand increased, Bramah sought ways to produce his locks in greater quantities, lower their cost, and standardize their quality.
In 1789, he hired eighteen-year-old Henry Maudslay, a promising mechanical engineer whose technical skill quickly earned him the position of chief engineer. Recognizing Maudslay’s exceptional talent, Bramah entrusted him with building a new lock he had designed — one that, in theory, could not be picked. Maudslay crafted the lock entirely by hand, and in 1790 it found a place in the Bramah Locks Company’s shop window, alongside a bold challenge to the world.
Joseph Bramah
The Bramah lock used a cylindrical key whose end was cut with a series of longitudinal slots of varying depths. When inserted into the lock and pressed against spring tension, the key would depress a set of sliders to precise depths, allowing it to turn and open the mechanism. While most locks of the era had only four to six sliders, Bramah’s design used eighteen — making it vastly more complex. With more than 470 million possible permutations, it was extraordinarily difficult to pick.
Joseph Bramah died in 1814, his lock still unbeaten. His sons took over the business, and the Challenge Lock remained in the shop window as a novel fixture gathering dust until August 1851, when it was finally opened by an American locksmith named Alfred Charles Hobbs.
Alfred Charles Hobbs worked for Day & Newell, a New York locksmith company, and had been sent to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace to present his employer’s Parautoptic lock. This lock was so named because its design included a shutter around the keyhole, preventing would-be pickers from inspecting the mechanism inside. Determined to prove the superiority of the Parautoptic lock, Hobbs set out to expose the weaknesses of his rivals — chief among them Jeremiah Chubb’s Detector lock and Joseph Bramah’s legendary Challenge Lock.
The Chubb Detector Lock, invented in 1818 by Jeremiah Chubb of Portsmouth, England, was a masterpiece of security engineering. Its defining feature was a clever safeguard: if anyone tried to pick it or use the wrong key, the mechanism would seize up, rendering the lock immovable. It could then be opened only with a special regulator key, or with the original key, but turned in an unusual direction — a clear signal to the owner that tampering had taken place. For any would-be intruder, the stakes were high: avoid triggering the lock’s “detector” mechanism, or face the added challenge of resetting it before making another attempt. This doubled the difficulty of the task and demanded a level of lock-picking skill that few on earth possessed.
Alfred Charles Hobbs
At the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hobbs stood before a gathering of scientific men in the glittering Crystal Palace and made a declaration that shocked the audience—even the finest British locks, he claimed, could be opened. To prove it, he produced one of Chubb’s famed Detector Locks. In a matter of minutes, with deliberate, practiced movements, Hobbs picked it open in full view.
Word of the feat spread quickly, but doubt followed close behind. In response, Hobbs arranged a public demonstration, inviting several prominent and impartial witnesses—including the makers of the Chubb lock themselves—to Westminster, to witness his attempt to pick the lock securing the iron door to the vault of the Depository of Valuable Papers.
Using an arsenal of specially designed tools and small weights, Hobbs attacked the vault’s Chubb lock and in just twenty-five minutes, it surrendered. The news hit Britain’s locksmithing world like a thunderclap.
Internal mechanism of the Chubb Detector Lock.
But Hobbs’s real quarry was still ahead. From the very start, even before humiliating the Chubb lock, he had written to the Bramah Locks Company, announcing his intention to take on their legendary Challenge Lock. The company agreed, and a committee of learned men was assembled to ensure the contest was fair.
The lock, untouchable for more than six decades, was removed from its dusty post in the shop window and carried upstairs. There, it was mounted between two stout planks and fixed to the wall, so that the hasp and keyhole were the only parts exposed. On 24 July 1851, Hobbs was led into the room alone, where he began his seemingly impossible task.
For a week, he laboured in isolation. Then, without warning, Bramah intervened. They summoned the committee to inspect Hobbs’s progress, but all three members were in Paris. The committee replied politely but dismissed the need for an inspection. Bramah was disappointed and refused Hobbs further access to the lock.
Days passed in stalemate until 8 August, when Bramah, still dissatisfied, pressed the committee again. He wished to test the lock himself to ensure it had suffered no damage, but the key was sealed away under the terms of the challenge. Eventually, after a tense meeting, the deadlock broke. On 16 August, Hobbs was allowed to resume. A week later—on 23 August—Hobbs, in the presence of two of the three committee members, displayed the Challenge Lock with its hasp open. It had taken him more than fifty-one hours of labour, spread over sixteen days. The unpickable lock was picked.
The Bramah Challenge Lock
Although Bramah acknowledged that Hobbs had indeed opened the lock, they were dissatisfied with both his method and the committee’s unwillingness to properly supervise the process. In early September, the company reluctantly paid Hobbs £210 — the equivalent of the two hundred guineas promised in the original challenge — but not without reservation. They noted that Hobbs had taken an extraordinarily long time to complete the task, making it impractical for any real-world burglary. Hobbs himself admitted that he preferred to work without observers, claiming that an audience made him nervous. “If the operation was so delicate,” Bramah asked pointedly, “what chance would a burglar have?”
They also took issue with Hobbs’s tools. Several of them had been fixed into the wooden frame that held the lock during the challenge, a setup Bramah argued would have been impossible had the lock been mounted on an iron door. Moreover, they believed Hobbs had strayed from the spirit of the challenge, which they intended to be met with a single lock-picking instrument — not a collection of specialised devices and fixtures that would be obvious in any real attempt at forced entry.
Bramah expressed their disappointment in a statement:
“From the course adopted, an opportunity for some good scientific results has been taken from us, as neither arbitrators nor anyone else saw the whole, or even the most important instruments by which it is said the lock was picked, actually applied in operation, either before or after the lock was presented open to the arbitrators.”
To Bramah, the challenge had been rendered meaningless. It had produced no insights to improve their locks, which, they insisted, had been the sole purpose of issuing it in the first place.
The lock-picking controversy did little to damage the fortunes of either Bramah or Chubb. If anything, the difficulty Hobbs faced in conquering the Bramah Challenge Lock only enhanced the company’s reputation for security. Both firms continued to thrive, incorporating new technologies — some inspired by Hobbs’s own techniques — into their products. Today, they remain pillars of the British security industry: Chubb has grown into a multinational manufacturer of safes and surveillance equipment, while Bramah, still operating a shop in central London, specialises in bespoke locks for high-end furniture and residential design.
As for Hobbs, he took his winnings and, instead of returning to New York and his employers at Day & Newell, chose to remain in London. There, he established his own lock-making business and introduced a high-security design of his own — the Protector lock — which he boldly claimed was impossible to defeat and superior to anything then in use. But in 1854, one of Chubb’s locksmiths managed to open it with the aid of special tools.
Hobbs’s firm nevertheless endured for over ninety years, until 1954, when it was acquired by none other than the Chubb Group, the very company whose locks Hobbs had once so publicly challenged.
References:
# “Bramah’s ‘Challenge Lock’”, Antique Box Guide
# “A. C. Hobbs and the Great Lock Controversy of 1851”, Cabinet Magazine
# “Scientist of the Day - Joseph Bramah”, Linda Hall Library
# “Scientist of the Day - Alfred Charles Hobbs”, Linda Hall Library
# “Joseph Bramah”, Encyclopedia.com
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