An Author With a True Lock on History

In January 1876, a gang from New York robbed a bank in Northampton, Mass., after breaking into a cashier’s home and forcing him to give up the combination.Robberies such as this helped lead to the rise of time locks, whose clock mechanisms kept bank vaults secure for a preset duration and foiled nighttime burglary plans.The curator of the Mossman Lock Collection at 20 W. 44th St., John Erroll, describes this and other history in “American Genius: Nineteenth Century Bank Locks and Time Locks” (Quantuck Lane Press), a book he co-authored with his son, David Erroll.The book recounts the rise of time locks after decades of innovation on key and combination locks.“The people who made these locks,” he said, “expressed their artistic creativity as well as their mechanical genius.” What is so unusual, he said, is that they exhibited such exquisite craftsmanship despite knowing that few people would ever view their work behind bank doors.Standing in the lock museum, located at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, Mr. Errol explains his early passion for locks.As a teenager growing up in Queens in the 1950s, he would head to the New York Public Library in Midtown to read books on how to pick locks. Just which ones Mr. Erroll declined to say, but he did relate the skill most needed in picking locks: “Patience.”The book idea occurred to Mr. Erroll, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, after he bought a time lock collection from a locksmith and machinist in Florida.About half of the book’s photos are from the Mossman Lock Collection, which shows the evolution of locks.The photos include locks by Solomon Andrews of Perth Amboy, N.J., who designed the first commercially successful vault lock in America.New York was once at the center for the lock industry, along with other hubs such as Stamford, Conn., Cincinnati, and Chicago.A number of the New York lock companies were downtown near Broadway and Maiden Lane, he said, including the one Mossman founded in 1877, Cady & Mossman.Mr. Erroll said Mossman was “a true Horatio Alger story” of rags to riches. Mossman’s locks were installed in vaults at the New York Stock Exchange,the Manhattan Trust Company, Bank of America, and Chemical National Bank, among others.One unusual lock in the museum’s collection is Wooley’s Fluid Time Lock (1877), an ingenious contraption in which water drops enable rotation of a cylinder. Then there’s the complicated “parautoptic” (which means “obscured from view”) lock by Day and Newell.For the book, Mr. Erroll also visited other collections, such as the one owned by J. Clayton Miller in Kentucky. His father was Harry Miller, who was known as “Miller the Safe Man.” He once went to the White House to open a safe for Franklin Roosevelt and also sprung open a bullion chest for General Chiang Kai-Shek.Proceeds from the sale of the book go to the General Society. Mr. Erroll is giving daily tours of the Mossman Lock Collection through Friday.When he is not at the lock museum, Mr. Erroll can admire his personal collection of roughly 250 locks. They are weakening the floorboards of his home, he said.

An Author With a True Lock on History

An Author With a True Lock on History

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