Safe-Crackers Pit Cunning Against Makers

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 282, 18 February 1928, Page 10

Safe-Crackers Pit Cunning Against Makers

New Tools and New Discoveries

SEEKING SECURITY

The burglary season, now in full swing, writes “The Observer,” has already afforded several exhibitions of thoroughly competent workmanship. The past week opened in good style with a highly technical affair in Bond Street, when an accomplished practitioner set himself the nice week-end problem of a jeweller’s safe, the door of which was in full view of the street. (It will be noted by his colleagues that ho had at least the advantage—for’ he was a blow-pipe man and darkness would have given him away—that the light was left burning in the shop.) His success was rewarded with a matter of four thousand pounds. The week was continued by a display of virtuosity and athletics at Messrs. Barkers’s Kensington store, a raid which, though highly organised and successful, was perhaps lacking in the solider virtues of scientific house-breaking. Taking the two together, the week has given us firstrate specimens of each of the two main branches of modern burglary, the atliletic and the scientific.

Of these the scientific is certainly the more interesting. Early burglars had no theory more subtle than that which holds that if you pull o.r push long enough and hard enough something will probably bend. Indeed, it ought to be confessed at once that some of the best modern instruments have a basic principle just as elementary, and demand not much more skill in use, than Jack Sheppard’s crowbars and wedges.

The First Safe But as long ago as 1795, when an English engineer decided that the wrought and banded treasure chests of his time, which were scarcely more secure than the treasure caskets of the Middle Ages, provided perhaps a fulcrum too many for safety, the evolution began of the polished impenetrabilities of to-day, which leave no more to get hold of than a skater finds when his feet go from under him. And from that moment there was stirred into life a competition which in some respects resembles a learned controversy between the burglars and the safe-makers, a controversy which goes on for ever.

A descendant of the # inventor of safes and a director of* the firm he founded furnished the writer with an exhaustive catalogue of the best burgling tools in use and an account of the present state of the controversy. During the last 50 years burglars have been able to make use in turn of hack saws, steel drills, circular cutters, electric drills, dynamite, electric arcs, coal-gas blow-pipes, hydrogen blow-pipes, nitro-glycerine, gelignite, and, latest of all, the oxyacetylene blow-pipe. Similarly, the safe-makers have worked out, step by step, replies to each challenge.

Steel and Security To the attack merely mechanical, they replied by building safes of layers of hard and soft steel welded together. Th© hard steel can be shattered; the soft can be drilled; the two together can be neither drilled nor shattered. It is true that inasmuch as the welded steel is expensive to produce, there are still some burglars who are satisfied to operate with drills and wrenches alone, and many safes which will yield to their attentions. An interesting set of tools has been invented. In each case the operator first drills through the side of the safe and firmly bolts his apparatus to it —providing himself thus with as many fulcrums as need be. The circular cutter, for instance, has a central screw which is bolted into the side of the safe, upon which the cutter revolves, and descending the spiral with each turn, cuts deeper into the metal, eventually cutting out a circular hole. For lightly built safes there are wrenches on the same principle, which will tear the door open. The simplest is a lever, bolted to the top left-hand corner of the safe and the same corner of the door and worked by a screw at the bottom right-hand corner; the lever is gradually lifted, and the door gives way. The Oxy-Acetylene Blow-pipe But this is child’s play. For a real safe there must be far more sophisticated attack. The steel must be melted or burned away. Most attractive of all, devices to this end, if only it were more practicable, is the electric arc, which in properly chosen circumstances could be worked at the expense of the owner of the safe, and connected with his own electric meter. Unfortunately, it is not nearly so practicable as the oxy-acetylene blowpipe, which must be charged at the burglar’s expense. This blow-pipe, which was used in Bond Street, was scarcely known before the war, though now it is in general use in even the smallest engineering shops. An acetylene flame, fed with oxygen direct (the gases are carried in cylinders, each about four feet high) is allowed to play on the steel till it is warm. The blow-pipe is capable of attaining a mere 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now while most of us have been taught in childhood that to burn a thing is but to oxidise it, it appears to us a form of words only with no direct application. But the burglar applies the principle. Having warmed his steel, he turns on a jet of oxygen, which plays on the metal simultaneously with the flame, and oxidises it—this is to say. burns it. His task is soon done. There are certain personal inconveniences. He gets bespattered with molten steel; he has to wear dark glasses or run the risk of blindness—but the safemakers, whereas they were originally provided with asbestos suits for blow-pipe work, now go about it in their shirt-sleeves, and probably the burglars are no less hardy. A greater difficulty is the white light thrown out by the blow-pipe.

It is a curiously subtle device with which the safe-makers countered the introduction of the blow-pipe into burglary. They found that by simply introducing a layer of cement between layers of differently tempered steel, the heat is so rapidly conducted over the whole plate that it is difficult to concentrate it on one point long enough for th© metal to be oxidised. Explosives As for explosives, gelignite is now the fashionable one. It is simple to use, has the consistency of putty, and can well be stuffed in a keyhole. To counter it, there is a device by which the very explosion which shatters the lock releases a new and much stronger series of bolts. Indeed, the makers have to b© called in to wield a legitimate blow-pipe next morning—for there is no second keyhole.

So it goes on. One of the players continues to say “check.” It is like the sex war of “Man and Superman.” Th© sex-war changes its front always; so does the safe-war. It is only in the former case—if we are to believe Strindberg and Bernard Shaw—that the burglar always wins.