Lost your keys? Better call a locksmith.
Lost your keys while locked in an explosive straight jacket? Better call Robert Lang.
Lang, 80, is a master locksmith and owner of Lang Locksmiths in Edmonton. He's also a magician, escape artist, safe-cracker, bomb-disposal expert and singer.
Yet he still locks himself out of his house sometimes. It was just the once, he says, after he took his wife, Jean, to the hospital for the birth of their first child at 4 a.m.
"I had to pick the door lock of our house to get in."
Locksmithing is an ancient craft, one traditionally shrouded in secrecy. The Gazette picked the brains of Lang and other local smiths to unlock some of the mysteries surrounding this trade.
One weird job
Lang's shop in Edmonton is a crowded place, stacked with safes and forms. Ancient time and combination locks line the shelves, while, in the back, uncut keys of every size and shape hang from colour-coded racks.
"I started as an apprentice in 1947," says Lang, in his radio-announcer's voice. His dad had just remarried after the war, and they didn't have money to send him to school. "I had a flair for mechanical things," he says, so he took a job with Joel Lipsett — the only locksmith in town. He started his own shop in 1972.
The escape-artist and magician work flowed from the job, he explains — he liked Houdini, and started using his locksmith skills to wriggle out of straight-jackets while hanging 18 metres in the air. There weren't any bomb squads back in the 1950s, so the cops would call someone like him to disarm the nitro-glycerine thieves used on vaults.
Phil Meagher also fell into locksmithing. The St. Albert resident and owner of Celtic Lockworks says he picked it up as a hobby in Nova Scotia. "I thought it would be a good thing to do in my retirement."
When he couldn't get a job as a phys-ed teacher in Alberta, he got a gig as a locksmith — a job he's held since 1979.
Locksmiths fix and sell locks, Meagher says. "The bread and butter of most locksmiths shops used to be keycutting and rekeying residential locks," he says, but nowadays most people just get a new key or lock from a Walmart. Most smiths specialize as a result — he deals in commercial and high-security locks, for example.
Lang specializes in safes, which means he's often called to banks when a lock fails or a combination gets lost. "It's very interesting and challenging," he says. "Every time the phone rings, it's someone with a problem which is a little bit different."
Five years ago, he recalls with a laugh, there was a man on the phone who wanted to know if they could open handcuffs. "All of a sudden, Jean [who took the call] hears a pounding," he says, followed by a panicked cry of, "It's the police!"
"It turned out it was an escaped prisoner who still had the handcuffs on!"
The job is not without its risks, according to Meagher. The worst jobs involve repo-men, as people aren't pleased when a locksmith helps them seize their property. "In the [United] States, there have been incidents of locksmiths being shot through the door."
Back in the old days, Lang says, you'd also run into safes still primed with nitro-glycerine. He recalls taking a hammer to one safe that had been in the shop for days when BANG! An explosion occurred. "The hammer I used to hit it flew out of my hand," he says. "It was enough to startle and jar me!"
Ancient devices
People have used locks to protect themselves and their property for thousands of years, says Shaun Lovell, who teaches the locksmith apprentice program at Red Deer College. The first locks were simple bars over doors, often dislodged with ropes and pulleys.
About 4,000 years ago, the Egyptians built a lock that used pins to hold a bar in place. By sliding a plank with a specific pattern of dowels sticking out of it into the lock, you could dislodge the pins and open the lock. Linus Yale used this same basic idea to invent the pin-tumbler lock in mid-1800s.
Pin tumblers are simple locks used in most doors, Meagher explains, as he twists one open in his Edmonton workshop. He pulls a steel plug from its housing. There's a row of brass circles along its length.
Most locks have five or six of these brass pins in them, he explains. Each has a spring-loaded twin in the lock housing that normally pushes past the edge of the cylinder, jamming it. "As you insert the key, it raises the pins." With the right key, you can raise the pins so that they line up with the cylinder's edge, or shear line, allowing you to turn the bolt and open the door.
Combination locks feature multiple notched cams on a common shaft, as Lang demonstrates. Each cam has a tooth that touches the one below it at a different point. By twisting the lock shaft different directions, you control the movement of each cam. Get the notches lined up, and the lock bar drops into them, opening the lock.
Picking and cracking
Locksmiths use special, but simple, tools to crack these devices. Meagher's toolkit contains the usual pliers and screwdrivers plus a brown leather pouch full of thin metal picks.
Lockpicking is still a sensitive subject amongst smiths, Meagher says, due to its potential for mischief. In general, a locksmith uses a pick — which has ball, diamond, hook or ripple tips — to carefully raise each pin to the shear line as he or she twists the cylinder with a tension wrench. The pins aren't lined up perfectly straight, so the smith can twist the lock a little further towards "open" with each successful pick and lock the pins in place.
"It's a tedious process," Meagher says, as the pins often slip, forcing you to start again. "There are locks that will defeat even the best locksmith on any given day, and they don't have to be expensive ones either." Some smiths prefer to use pick guns to hit all the pins at once, hoping for a lucky bounce that creates a perfect alignment.
Lang's safe-cracking kit is a little more esoteric. It's a black briefcase full of tools, magnifiers, extra-big dials and a contact microphone and headset made from Canadian Tire parts.
Safe-cracking is a matter of twisting, listening and feeling. The clicks and clacks of a lock are like the beats of a heart to a doctor, Lang says, and a locksmith can use them to decipher a lock's inner workings. Sometimes this takes minutes; other times, days. And sometimes you have to drill through the lock or vault wall — never a cheap prospect.
Unlocking the future
Locks have come a long way in recent years, Meagher says, with many using technologies not even invented when he started. Keypads with digital buttons that can register multiple taps can have millions of combinations, for example, making them very secure. Other locks use sensitive magnets or pick-proof discs instead of pins, or computer chips embedded in keys.
But security comes at a price, Lovell notes: a top-of-the-line lock runs at $500 a cylinder and $100 a key. "That helps you understand why the old stuff is still on the market."
And even the best lock won't stop a determined thief with a crowbar, Meagher notes. "You're making it as difficult as possible for the burglar to get in, and buying yourself time."
Lang says he hopes to retire soon and turn to teaching full time. It's getting tough to find good apprentices, though — many don't know how to use the basic hand tools that go with the job.
Meagher says he's still got a few years in the business yet.
"It's never boring," he says, and you're always running into new locks, people and technologies on the job. "It's an extremely interesting field to be in. That's the trap!"
