Innovation in the Locksmith Industry
The German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, inventor of the eponymous airship, was the laughing stock of his family. To his cousins, he was just a crank, or a mad scientist. But he was an important innovator, and revolutionised air travel.
There is constant innovation going on in the locksmith industry all the time. Every trade expo I go to, I see countless new things that are clever and interesting (though not always practical…). Here are a couple of innovations happening in the trade right now:
Smart locks
We’ve spoken about smart locks before. It’s an area that every manufacturer is keen on getting a foot through the door.
There’s a huge variety of them on the market at the moment, with a huge range of quality, too. They’re getting quite popular in America, where it’s very common to let grocery delivery firms into your home. The difference between the USA and the UK is that most American doors have a certain type of lock on them (a so-called knobset). This uniformity makes it very easy for manufacturers to develop a product that’s universally applicable. The UK has an astonishing variety of lock types, however, which makes it all the more difficult.
In a few years, a couple of brands will take the lead in the scramble for smart lock supremacy. When that day comes, it will become much easier to buy and install them.
Auto-locksmithing tools
While a traditional locksmith will use more ‘normal’ tools in his daily life, e.g. chisel, lock pick, screwdriver, etc., vehicle locksmiths use a whole different set of tools. The auto-locksmithing industry is seeing a boom at the moment, and consequently loads of effort is being put into improving the tools.
Special types of vehicle pick are constantly being developed. They’re sophisticated little pieces of kit that will let you into a locked car, if you’re dexterous enough to manage!
But most of an auto-locksmith’s tools are computerised. They use expensive internet-activated gear to clone transponder chips, and yet more gear to ‘communicate’ with the car. Firms are trying very hard to make this process straightforward, and to ensure that auto-lockies have the ability to clone every car key.
There’s still a long way to go in the car business, but that’s what the innovation is for!
Fingerprint-recognition padlocks
Asec has recently release a fingerprint-recognition padlock, which is kinda cool. Yes, it’s a total gimmick in many ways, but what I’m impressed with is how they managed to make this padlock outdoor-suitable. It’s not just a flimsy piece of junk, but a proper padlock.
The fingerprint feature is useful if the padlock locks something that various people need access to, because you can store up to ten users, none of whom will need a key. Keys don’t need to be distributed, and so keys can’t get lost (or copied by people who shouldn’t be making copies).
It’ll be some while, I reckon, before fingerprint padlocks will be good enough to store the thousand-odd fingerprints of members of an angling club, but no doubt they’ll get there!
Mechanical digi-locks
One of the big problems with mechanical digi-locks (those non-electric keypads you see all over the place on gates and such) is that it doesn’t matter which order your press the buttons in, nor whether you press a button more than once. This means that, if the code is 1960, you can type in 1960, 6901, 6699010011001169 or any other combination of those four digits and the lock will open.
Why is that a problem? Two main reasons: firstly, the numbers rub off if pressed a lot. This means that, if 1, 9, 6 and 0 are all worn out, you know which buttons to press to get in, and it doesn’t even matter which order you press them in. Secondly, most people like to choose years in the twentieth century for their codes, for some reason. If 6 and 0 are a bit worn out, you can bet that the other two digits of the code are 1 and 9.
But digi-locks are being invented where the sequence of digits matters and where you can re-use digits within the code. The code could be 11960, for instance. So, even if the buttons wear out, you won’t necessarily be able to guess the code.
While innovation is always to be encouraged, it is worth remembering that even the Zeppelin airship had its Waterloo, following the Hindenburg-disaster (pictured above). We must always be responsible innovators.