 hearts, triangles, shields, or barrels, featuring spring locks and swinging shackles that swooped and scrolled like cat tails.
“Pull locks” were employed for sheds and barns where valuable stores of food and grain were kept on farms in the 17th century. To open such a lock, a person had to manipulate the key with one hand while pulling the ring attached to the bolt with the other.
In the early 18th century, Swedish mechanical engineer Christopher Polhem created his “unpickable” padlock, the forebear of the modern padlock. Inside the lock was a series of st...
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the English made locks that were difficult to pick thanks to complicated lever systems—examples include Robert Barron’s 1778 double-acting tumbler lock and Jeremiah Chubb’s 1818 lock. In 1784, Joseph Bramah patented his safety lock, which employed a cylindrical key with slides that must be cut to the correct length to turn the bolt.
The Victorian Era was the height of invention and creativity when it came to making padlocks in the United States and Europe. Barron's lever-tumbler invention led to padlock manufacturers boasting the number of levers their locks contained, sometimes even marked on the lock like the Cleveland 4-Way. Some padlocks contained as many as 6 to 8 levers; the more levers, the more secure the bolt.
These antique padlocks usually featured brass levers, which doesn't rust easily, while the casings could be made of brass, tin, steel, or iron. In a frenzy to patent their lock designs, makers created beautiful logos with words, pictures, scrolling, or monograms cast into them—once patented, no other company could use those words or images in their locks.
Some of the most stunning 19th-century locks feature bull dogs, lions, or dragons on them. Highly collected brands from this era include Winchester, Sure Grip, WB (Wilson Bohannan), Yale, Corbin Ironclad, Miller, and Excelsior. Even the famous E.C. Simmons Keen Kutter brand had a lock in its trademark pie-and-wedge logo shape.
Push-key lever locks, particularly flat ones called "pancake locks," are especially favored by collectors. Commemorative locks, too, have been issued for big events in the United States, and also for special anniversaries of lock companies.
Even more coveted, though, are story locks, which feature elaborate pictures on both sides. These rare padlocks were made in the late 1800s and would have, for example, the face of a man leaning through a window on the front, his mouth as the keyhole, and his legs sticking out the window on the back, with perhaps a dog tugging at his ankle. Collectors have to be wary, though, as some story locks have been reproduced.
"Logo locks" are those made with the name of the end-user company on them as opposed to the lock manufacturer. The first of these were made for railroads, a kind of lock particularly coveted by railroadiana collectors. Many of these are brass and heart-shaped, but they came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. The only defining feature of the railroad lock is that it features the name or initials of the railroad company, from the Northern Pacific to the Santa Fe.
Starting in 1925, the Best Universal Lock Company capitalized on the logo-lock concept with its interchangeable core locks. Since its founding, Best has emblazoned the names and logos of more than 5,000 end-user companies on its plain-looking brass pin-tumbler locks. Logo locks generally found their way to the public through employees of the end-user companies, who received old locks as souvenirs.
Padlock collectors sometimes specialize in locks made for the U.S. military, or those used by the U.S Postal Service. Others are fond of miniature locks. Two especially intriguing categories of padlock-collecting are cut-away locks and trick locks. Cut-away locks are generally locks designed by hardware manufacturers with pieces cut out to show off the lock's inner workings. These were usually used as salesmen samples and in stores to demonstrate how the locks work, although some were made by tinkerers and educators to study lo