Forceful and able as Wilkinson was, another man, Joseph Bramah, living in London about the same time, had a much more direct influence on tool building. Bramah was a Yorkshire farmer’s boy, born in 1748, and lame.[21] As he could not work on the farm he learned the cabinet maker’s trade, went to London, and, in the course of his work which took him into the well-to-do houses about town, he made his first successful invention--the modern water-closet. He patented it in 1778 and 1783, and it continues to this day in substantially the same form. In 1784 he patented a lock, which was an improvement on Barron’s, invented ten years before, and was one of the most successful ever invented. For many years it had the reputation of being absolutely unpickable. Confident of this, Bramah placed a large padlock on a board in his shop window in Piccadilly and posted beneath it the following notice: “The artist who can make an instrument that will pick or open this lock shall receive two hundred guineas the moment it is produced.” [21] The best account of Bramah is given in Smiles’ “Industrial Biography,” pp. 228-244. Boston, 1864. Many tried to open it. In one attempt made in 1817, a clever mechanic named Russell spent a week on it and gave it up in despair. In 1851 Alfred C. Hobbs, an American, mastered it and won the money. He was allowed a _month_ in which to work and the Committee of Referees in their report stated that he spent sixteen days, and an actual working time of fifty-one hours, in doing it. This gave Hobbs a great reputation, which he enhanced by picking every other lock well known in England at that time, and then showing how it was done. This started up the liveliest kind of a controversy and gave everyone a chance to write to the _Times_. They all began first picking, then tearing each other’s locks. Headlines of “Love (Hobbs?) Laughs at Locksmiths,” “Equivocator” and other like terms appeared.[22] [22] Price: “Fire and Thief-proof Depositories, and Locks and Keys.” It was finally recognized that any lock could be picked by a skillful mechanic with a knowledge of locks, if he were given time enough. The old Bramah lock, made, by the way, by Henry Maudslay himself, did not fare so badly. Hobbs had unmolested access to it for days with any tools he could bring or devise; and though he finally opened it, a lock probably sixty years old which could stand such an assault for fifty hours was secure for all ordinary purposes.[23] [23] Anyone who is interested can find an account of the affair in Price’s “Fire and Thief-proof Depositories, and Locks and Keys,” published in 1856, and Mr. Hobbs has given his own personal account of it, explaining how the work was done, in the Trans. of the A. S. M. E., Vol. VI, pp. 248-253.