MODERN RAFFLES BAFFLED

Evening Star, Issue 22327, 1 May 1936, Page 4

MODERN RAFFLES BAFFLED

BURGLAR PROOF SAFES 150 YEARS' RECORD Not least among the wonders of modem invention that will go to sea with the liner Queen Mary (says the ‘ Observer ') is a safe whose locks and steel frame would defy a whole gang of burglars, armed with the most ingenious tools of their craft. It has been installed on board for the Midland Bank by the house of John Tann Ltd., strong-room engineers to the Bank of England, who can boast proudly that during a history of nearly 150 years no safe of theirs with any claim to bo burglarresisting has been broken open. Apart from' guarding against risks of lire and-flood, it has been the business of safe-makers ever since • the days of the treasure chest to outwit the burglar. They have succeeded so well by many ■ devices that probably no informed cracksman in these days would think much of his chances of breaking through anything like the strongroom door of a bank. Many romantic notions have been woven around the mysterious workings of a strongroom door, but if a visit to Messrs Tann’s works in the East End of London dispelled most of them, it provided an impressive insight to what, after all, claims to be more than a specialised branch of engineering. AN EIGHT DAYS’ TEST. The most deadly weapons of Rallies up-to-date are the oxy-acetylene blowpipe, the electric drill, and high explosives; they are all useless against a typo of steel perfected by Messrs Tann comparatively recently, and given the name of “ Tannsteel.” For eight days the British Oxygen Company tested a 6£in slab of this metal with every known device, including the powerful oxygen lance, which is normally beyond the scope of any burglar, and they then certified it to be totally impenetrable. This being the stuff of which many of the world’s great strongroom doors are made, there remains the matter of locks. In a corner of the works stand two doors destined for the vaults of a colonial bank. The one is the main entrance, a towering affair weighing 12 tons, with its burnished capstan wheel and fittings, the _ other, smaller, but built on identical lines to servo as an emergency door. They are made of “ Tannsteel ” about 9in thick, and are watertight and fireproof. Each has two combination locks capable of 100,000,000 variations, and a key-lock, which means that it will be under the divided control of at least three people. If these three people should fall into the hands of revolutionaries who might seize the building, any attempts to open the door by the use of the combinations and keys extracted from the bank officials would bo defeated by an “ insurrection device ” brought into action in such an emergency. If a burglar attempted to blow the locks off the door or he achieved the impossible by getting through the steel with a blowpipe, then separate mechanism would come into play to lock the bolts automatically. As though this were not enough, hidden in the main door is a time-lock, controlled by three chronometers ih case one, or two, should fail, through which the normal looks cannot be operated before a certain time sot up to 96 hours in advance. Not long ago a huge circular door, 30 tons in weight, was sent out to a foreign bank. It was controlled by a time-lock with four clocks, two key-locks, bination locks, an “ insurrection lock,” and an electrical device to make sure that the time-lock had been set.