Modern safes have only been around for a few hundred years, but their locks have been around for thousands of years. Let's take a look at the history of some of these ancient devices.
While the actual history of safes may not be very long, the main component and perhaps one of the most important parts of a safe was the lock. It's hard to say when locks were first invented because there isn't always a written history and because of the materials used to make locks, there aren't many today. However, there is evidence that many different civilizations developed locks independently, among them the Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese and Romans. But one nice thing about old castles is that they are the building blocks on which today's technology was built. Locks have evolved, but many of the principles are the same in modern safes.
The oldest known castle is attributed to the ancient Egyptians and is about 4000 years old. It was discovered in Persia in 1842. This first lock uses the same tumbler pin system that is still used on many safe models today. An Egyptian lock had a wooden cross-beam that was partially hollowed out and a vertical beam with metal tumblers connecting the two pieces together. It was unlocked with a large wooden spoon shaped key that was about 14" - 24" long with pins sticking out of one end. There was actually a hole in the door that you had to stick your arm with a key through to get to the switches. If the key was inserted correctly, the pins on the key would line up with the latches, allowing you to move the cross member and open the door. These locks were used on full size doors to protect strong rooms that were used to store valuables, food or anything that needed to be securely guarded. So for the same basic reasons you can have a vault today, just on a much larger scale.
We know that the Greeks had early locks because of a description by Homer in the "Odysseus" from around 800 BC. Referring to someone being given a brass key to open a storehouse, he describes the lock as follows: "She loosened the strap from the doorknob, inserted the key and took him straight home to shoot back the bars that held the door." Door is plural because most Greek doors were two doors that opened from the center. These doors were usually tied together with rope using intricate knots, and then the doors bolted from the inside. This type of lock was not very secure because after the rope removed, the door would often take several tries with several different key patterns to open.
The Romans started with a similar design, but improved it by using an iron casing around the breech, so the breech was spring-loaded and using guards. A security lock used a set of obstacles that prevented the lock from being opened without the correct key having matching notches to slide over the obstacles - a concept still used on many domestic doors today. If you look at the master key, you can tell by the notches the size and number of obstacles inside the lock. The Chinese are also credited with inventing the protection lock, so it's one of those types of things with dual evolution in two different parts of the world. The compartment lock was also well suited to the first portable safes, often called safe boxes in medieval Europe.
Apart from the more complex compartment locks, there was no major development of security until the eighteenth century in England, when incentives were offered to anyone who could develop an immovable lock. Since then, we have seen huge improvements in locks, security and the development of the modern safe, but even these improvements were based on the same basic principles used in ancient times.
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