How genius works

The BBQ Pit
1

In “Genius,” the excellent biography of physicist Richard Feynman, James Gleick recounts how Feynman bolstered his reputation for genius.

An iconoclast who resented the security measures imposed on him while working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project, Feynman would drive the security men nuts by leaving them notes inside their safes.

I had read about this years ago while working on a history of the Manhattan Project, and had been curious as to how he could have done it. After all, the safes in question had a combination that consisted of three numbers between 1 and 100, meaning one million possible combinations! How could he find the one right one in a million? He must be a genius!

Well, of course, he was. But once you learn his method, as when you learn the secret of a magic trick, you think, “Of course. It’s so obvious!”

For the sake of brevity, I’ll skip some of the details, and refer anyone who needs more information to pages 189-190 of “Genius.”

The two most important points are that, although the dial has 100 markings, in point of fact many safes (at least in the 1940s–things may have changed since then) have a mechanical slop of plus or minus two. Meaning that if you intend to dial in 36 and instead hit 38, you’ll still get in. This means that you would only have to try one in five numbers. So all of a sudden we’re down from 1 million to 8,000.

A dramatic improvement, but still, trying 8,000 combinations would take quite a bit of time and be very tedious.

The second point knocks it down even further: the majority of people, when asked to provide a combination, will select a date, usually their birthday or that of a family member.

So if the safe worked perfectly (i.e. no slop), you’d only have to try 365 combinations. With the slop, it’s down to 180 (3 for the month, 6 for the day, 10 for a year within the last 50 years). And on average you’ll only have to try half of the possibilities before you get in. This can be done in a few minutes.

Of course, simply by finding out the birthdays of the safe’s primary user and his/her spouse and children, you have a very good chance of getting in within seconds.

Just the other day I watched as an old friend of mine opened a digital door lock with a six-digit combination, and without seeing all the digits she entered I realized she had used the birthday of her daughter (my god-daughter). I told her the story of Dr. Feynman and advised that using a birthday wasn’t good security practice.

Right about now you’re undoubtedly thinking, “Fascinating story, James, and very well written, too! But why are you posting it here in the Pit?”

Well, because the other day someone posted in the GQ section to ask about opening a safe that he had inherited. Several people said that calling a locksmith was the only option. One poster even referred to Feynman, without providing the useful details I have included above.

I was about to do so, when a moderator closed the thread, saying that information about criminal activity wouldn’t be tolerated. Now the thread seems to be completely gone.

I consider this to be short-sighted and downright silly. Even if the OP was up to no good, it’s not as though this information is not available in every library. (Interestingly, the Web was not as helpful as I expected. I found out how to build an atomic bomb, complete with quaint, if slightly impractical, ASCII-character drawings, in less than two minutes, but none of the pages I found in 15 minutes of searching on “how to crack a safe” offered Feynman’s time-saving advice. They recommended the usual movie-style stethoscope methods, with no thought of human engineering.) I thought this site was supposed to be fighting ignorance.

So I offer the information above as an interesting historical incident, and not with the intention of helping anyone violate the law. And I suggest the moderators lighten up a bit. It’s not as though we’re giving away troop movements here.

2

The book at my bedside is “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman.”

He was a remarkable man.

3

Well, Harry Miller was a master of safe manipulation.

Without going into to much detail, there are indicators at the contact points of a safe that change as the alignment of the wheels change. Knowing this you can manipulate a standard group two safe lock. I have seen first hand national contests where safe techs compete to see who has the best time. (we are talking about minutes not hours)

There is a machine out there for sale that does this and normally opens the container in under 45 minutes.

It is a skill that takes loads of practice and patience.

Side note. Henry Miller designed a manipulation proof lock shortly after WW2. Which is standard for all Goverment containers and called Group 1 locks.
Group 1r locks are not proof against X-ray attacks as well.
Henery Miller was a very well respected locksmith and safe technician. I got to spend a few hours with him and veiwing his HUGE safe and lock collection in Lexington Ky. The collection is now on display with his sons company Outside of Lexington (nicholasville?) the companys name is Lockmasters. If your ever in the area the collection is AMAZING…

4

So…opening an inherited safe is illegal?! What state does that moderator live in, anyway?!

5

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it. --Richard Feynman. :slight_smile:

6

By the way, Feynman was a freaking liar. The books is great, but the stories are totally exaggerated.

7

You’re accusing Feynman of total exaggeration, out-of-body-boy?

Ding-ding! Irony prize!

8

:smiley: I have no idea what the story is behind out-of-body-boy, but this is hilarious anyway.

9

Unfortunately, I realized only later that I was actually confusing lucwarm with lekatt. The latter built up a reputation for arguing in GD threads that out-of-body experiences were logical and plausible (here, for example). Lekatt has a cosmic invulnerability to logic, so when I thought it was him dissing Feynman, I jumped the gun.

In any case, admitting that Feynman might have told some tall tales does not make him a “freaking liar.”

10

Ah yes. I am familiar with Lekatt. Out-of-body-boy, I like it.

11

The OP doesn’t tell the whole Feynman story.

Feynman devoted a great deal of study to the locks. He realized that there were three disks, and when the combination was entered correctly, each disk, in turn, was left oriented in a way which let the bolt move; the bolt could only move if all three disks were properly aligned.

When the safes at Los Alamos were opened, the bolt could (obviously) move up and down. The moment the dial was turned, the bolt would stay down, as the third disk was no longer aligned. But if he’d turn it to the correct third number of the combination, the bolt could move again. A few moment’s more work would allow him to pick off the second number. Whiel the same technique could also yield the first number, at that point it was eaiser to try all possible combinations using the second and third to divine the first.

Feynman kept notes on the various combinations he discovered (on a piece of paper that he hid inside his own safe’s lock – he had to disassemble his lock to get at it!). He also developed the habit of taking the numbers off a safe when he was in an office, just for practice.

He says that often enough, they would need to get into someone’s safe to get something when the owber wasn’t there. He developed a reputation as a good safecracker: when someone would ask him to open a safe for which he hadn’t yet gotten the combination, he’d say he was too busy just then. But when he was asked to open a safe that he had the combo for, he’d “go get his tools” - disassemble his own lock, check his notes, and then go “safecrack” the safe.

He tells the story of being in Oak Ridge, and delivering a report to a colonel there. He reports that the colonel felt himself far too important to have an ordinary safe – he ordered a special multi-ton safe. Feynman was delighted to discover that this big, important safe used the exact same type of lock as their little safes did, and just to be sure, he took the last two numbers off it while standing in the colonel’s office. After the colonel closed the safe, Feynman told him the safes weren’t secure, and proved it by opening the safe, then explaining how he did it. He told the colonel that the vulnerability was in leaving the safe open while he worked. “I see, very interesting,” replied the colonel.

Several months later, Feynman was again at Oak Ridge, and was surprised at all the secretaries telling him, “Don’t come in the office! Don’t come in here!”

It developed that the colonel had immediately sent around a memo asking everyone, “During his last visit here, was Professor Feynman in your office?” Those that answered yes received another memo: “Change your safe combination.”

That was his solution - Feynman himself was the danger. Meanwhile, of course, people still continued to work with their safes open…

  • Rick
12

Well, that was at least part of his solution; and he was quite right too. Combinations known to the wrong people need to be changed pronto. It’s not clear from your account whether or not he also asked for safes to be left closed in future. If not, then of course you’re quite right.

13

This gets my nomination for the least Pit-like OP we have had for a while. Still, it was interesting in a MPSIMS sense.

“how do I open a inherited safe?” “I am writing a novel, what is the best way to smuggle crack?” “I saw this on TV, is this how I disable someone’s car” “Safest way to make a pipe bomb, I need to know for my slash fan-fiction story” :dubious:

14

::: scratches head:::
The only safe cracking thread I have seen recently is this one which is still open.

Am I just not doping enough? :confused:

15

From my memory of the book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes (a truly wonderful book), safe cracking and lock-picking became obscessive hobbies for the sciientists to prevent themselves from going stir crazy. One day, someone realized that no one knew the combination of one of the safes for some reason. They called in a technician from a safe company and expected him to take hours to open the safe, if he was successful at all (after all, this was the Manhattan Project, with ostensibly the best safes in the world).

The technician became a folk legend among the scientists by opening the safe within minutes. The smartest people in the world never figured out how he did it. Years later, the technician confessed that he tried the default combination that comes with the safe when you buy it, the combination that ALL these safes had before they were (supposed to be) reset by the owner. It opened the safe.

The most secret project in the world, and they didn’t reset the combination.

16

Sorry - thought it was clear from:

There was no request to close safes - just to avoid Feynman.

  • Rick
17

The op was written a month ago, so you’d have to look pretty far down the list to find it. :wink:

18

No, as I said, the moderator apparently did not merely close it, but actually removed it completely.

js_africanus: Presumably the moderator did not buy the “inherited safe” story of the OP in the original thread.

I wrote the OP in this thread to chastise this (IMO) overly cautious moderator. Hence the Pit. But I’m not very good at flaming.

19

I’m just tittering at the fact that Feynn has on his night table “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”.

Surely you’re joking, Feynn-man.

:: rimshot ::

:: flees the thread immediately ::