safe cracking

It's funny, folks, on a mailing list that I am on professionally, someone is asking for advice on getting an old safe opened. They are in search of safe crackers! Wish I could send Heyes their way.

I've curious - is there any good information out there historically about real safe cracking in the 19th century? I've always noticed that the series was very careless with the dynamite. If you just put naked dynamite outside of a safe, so far as I understand, it would blow harmlessly away no matter now much there was. You would have to have some way of directing the force of the blast toward the door to make it do anything. And even then, blasting a door in sure wouldn't help it to open out, would it? I understand that the famous Heyes way of putting nitro into a safe and blowing it from the inside was very real, except it was powder rather than liquid explosive and it happened later in history.


HW

Not sure if these will help or not, but they seemed the best of a boatload of links that came up on a brief search of the topic.

http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/household-safety/security/safecracking.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-cracking

http://www.reddit.com/r/lockpicking/comments/160k3l/question_about_safe_cracking_what_exactly_am_i/

http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=70963

I'll have a look - thanks Remuda!

HW

Try this book: The King of Heists by J. North Conway if you want to read about a real 19th century safe cracker. It provides great detail on actual bank robberies by skilled thieves.

Thanks so much, BeeJay! That sounds like a lot of fun.
HW

The King of Heists is a great book! I wrote about it on my blog a few years ago: http://asjmoviewesternsetc.blogspot.com/2010/03/king-of-heists.html

Thanks, Ghislaine Emrys! I really will have to look into it. It doesn't have anything to do with my current stories, but I've thought of doing one set earlier in which it might play a major role. Don't know if I'd ever really have time to scope it out, but I could enjoy the reading! It's wonderful these days how you can find and buy almost any old book through the internet. I do it all the time for my professional research, since I no longer live near any major libraries.
HW