Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Simon Winchester

Robbery was frequent. Fear was in the air. Doors and windows needed to be bolted. Locks had to be made, and made well. A lock such as Mr. Marshall’s, pickable in fifteen minutes by a skilled man, and by a desperate and hungry man maybe in ten, was clearly not good enough. Joseph Bramah decided he would design and make a better one.

      He did so in 1784, less than a year after picking the Marshall lock. His patent made it almost impossible for a burglar with a wax-covered key blank, the tool most favored by the criminals who could use it to work out the position of the various levers and tumblers inside a lock, to divine what was beyond the keyhole, inside the workings. Bramah’s design, which he patented that August, had the various levers inside a lock rise or fall to different positions when the key was inserted and turned to release the bolt, but then had those same levers return to their initial positions once the bolt had been shot. The effect of this was to make the device almost burglar-proof, for no amount of foraging with a wax key blank would ever allow a picklock to work out where the levers needed to be (as they weren’t there anymore) in order to free the bolt.

      Once Bramah had come up with this basic mechanical premise, it remained for him, with great cleverness and elegance, to form the entire lock into a cylindrical shape, with its levers not so much rising and falling under the influence of gravity as moving in and out along the radii of the cylinder under the impress of the key’s various teeth, and then moving back to their original positions with the aid of a spring, one for each lever. The entire lock could thus be rendered as a small tube-shaped brass barrel, which could be easily fitted into a tube-shaped cavity in a wooden door or an iron safe, and with the deadbolt flush to the door’s outer edge (when the lock was open) or settled into its brass cavity in the door frame (when securely closed).

      Joseph Bramah would go on to invent many more contraptions and concepts during his life, many of them having nothing to do with locks, but involving his particular other fascination with the behavior of liquids when subjected to pressure. He invented the hydraulic press, for example, with its vast importance in industry worldwide. More trivially, he launched onto the market a primitive form of fountain pen^* and drew designs for a propelling pencil; more lastingly, he made the beer engine, which is still employed by the more traditionally minded innkeepers, and which would allow beer kept cool in a cellar to be pressure-delivered to thirsty customers in the bar above. (This invention obviated the need for the bartender to stagger up and down the cellar stairs, lugging fresh barrels of ale.) Draft beer drinkers today have little cause to remember the name “Bramah,” though there is a pub in Lancashire named for him. Likewise, few banknote printers know that it was Joseph Bramah who made the first machine that could cleverly ensure that their thousands of identical bills each bore a different sequential number. He also made an engine for planing large wooden planks, another for making paper, and he forecast that, one day, large screws would be used to propel big ships through the water.

      Yet it is really only by way of his lock making that Bramah’s name has now formally entered the English language. True, one can still find in literature references to a Bramah pen and a Bramah lock—the Duke of Wellington wrote admiringly of each, as did Walter Scott and Bernard Shaw. Yet when the word is used alone—and Dickens did on numberless occasions, in The Pickwick Papers, in Sketches by Boz, in The Uncommercial Traveller—it is a reminder that at least for the Victorian citizenry, his was an eponym: one used a Bramah to open a Bramah, one’s home was secured with a Bramah, one gave a Bramah to a favored friend so he or she might visit at all hours, come what may. Only when Mr. Chubb and Mr. Yale arrived on the scene (noted by the Oxford English Dictionary as first making it into the language in 1833 and 1869, respectively) did Joseph Bramah’s lexical monopoly hit the buffers.

      What made a Bramah lock so good was its vastly complicated internal design, of course, but what made it so lastingly good was the precision of its manufacture. And that was less the work of its inventor than of the man—the boy, really—whom Bramah hired to make copious numbers of his device and to make them well, to make them fast, and to make them economically. Henry Maudslay was eighteen years old when Bramah lured him away as an apprentice: he would go on to become one of the most influential figures in the early days of precision engineering, his influence being felt to this day both in his native Britain and around the world.

      The very young Maudslay, “a tall, comely young fellow” by the time Bramah hired him, cut his teeth in the Woolwich Royal Arsenal in East London. Working first as a twelve-year-old powder monkey—small boys, fleet of foot, were used by the Royal Navy to bring gunpowder down from the ships’ magazines to the gun deck—he was then moved to the carpenter’s shop, only to pronounce himself bored by the inaccuracy of wood. It was starkly clear to all who employed him that the youngster much preferred metal. They looked away when he smuggled himself into the dockyard smithy, and they said nothing when he developed a sideline in making a range of useful and very handsome trivets out of cast-off iron bolts.

      IN 1789, JOSEPH Bramah cut an anxious figure. The political situation across the Channel was causing an influx of terrified French refugees, most of them bound for London, where the more nervously xenophobic residents of England’s capital suddenly started to demand ever more security for their homes and businesses. Bramah, with his patent-protected monopoly, was caught in a bind: he alone could make his locks, but neither he nor any engineer he could find had the ability to make them in sufficient numbers at a low enough price. Most men who called themselves engineers may have been adept at the cruder crafts—at thumping ingots of heat-softened iron with heavy hammers and then working to shape the crudely formed results with anvils, chisels, and, most especially, files—but few had a great feel for delicacy, for the construction of (and the word had only recently been adopted) mechanisms.

      Change was coming, though. Workers at the smithies of eighteenth-century London were a close-knit group, and word eventually did reach Bramah that a particular youngster at Woolwich was startlingly unlike his older peers and, rather than bashing hunks of iron, was apparently crafting metal pieces of an unusual, fastidious daintiness. Bramah interviewed the teenage Maudslay. Though taking to him immediately, the former was only too well aware that the custom was for any would-be entrant to the trade to serve a seven-year apprenticeship. However, commercial need trumped custom: with would-be patrons beating down his door back on Piccadilly, Bramah had no time to spare for the niceties, decided to take a chance, and hired the youngster on the spot. His decision was to change history.

      Henry Maudslay turned out to be a transformative figure. First of all, he solved Bramah’s supply problems in an inkling—but not by the conventional means of hiring workers who would make the locks one by one through the means of their own craftsmanship. Instead, and just like John Wilkinson two hundred miles west and thirteen years earlier, Maudslay created a machine to make them. He made a machine tool: in other words, a machine to make a machine (or, in this case, a mechanism). He built a whole family of machine tools, in fact, that would each make, or help to make, the various parts of the fantastically complicated locks Joseph Bramah had designed. They would make the parts, they would make them fast and well and cheaply, and they would make them without the errors that handcrafting and the use of hand tools inevitably bring in their train. The machines that Maudslay made would, in other words, make the necessary parts with precision.

      Three of his lock-making devices can be seen today in the Science Museum in London. One is a saw that cut the slots in the barrels; another—perhaps less a machine tool than a means of ensuring that production went along at high speed, with every part made exactly the same—is a quick-grip, quick-release vise, a fixture that would hold the bolt steady while it was milled by a series of cutters mounted on a lathe; and the third is a particularly clever device, powered by a foot-operated treadle, that would wind the lock’s internal springs and hold them under tension as they were positioned and secured in place until the outer cover, a well-shined brass plate with the flamboyant signatures of the Bramah Lock Company of 124 Piccadilly, London, inscribed on its face, was bolted on to finish the job.

      A fourth and, some would argue, most supremely important machine tool component also started to make its widespread appearance around this time. It would shortly become an integral part of the lathe, a turning device that, much like a potter’s wheel, has been a mechanical aid to the betterment of human life since its invention in pharaonic Egypt. Lathes evolved very