It is probably true to say that no single person had as much impact on the British lock trade as Alfred Charles Hobbs. He arrived in England around the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 as the salesman for Day & Newell of New York. He was already an accomplished picker of locks, a technique he frequently employed as a sales tactic.

He set to discredit the two most famous and respected locks of the day, the Bramah lock and the Chubb detector lock. The process of this picking and the huge controversy was avidly followed in the press at the time and has been the subject of much discussion since. I plan to cover the picking of the locks and the details of the controversy in the future.

By picking the Chubb detector lock and the Bramah lock he forced change and improvements on the manufacturers, He also championed the extensive use of machines for the manufacture of locks rather than the traditional hand made locks. Shortly after the exhibition he established his own factory, first making locks for other manufactures notably Milners' and eventually became one of the major lock and safe manufactures. Hobbs left England and returned to the USA around 1862 and the firm was run by Thomas Hart, although it continued to bear his name until it was bought by Chubbs in the 1960's.

Hobbs main patents where his 'protectors' the first being the anti-pressure bolt stump and the second being a 'protector against fraud' this was essentially a bolt thrower, which removed the responsibility for the correct throwing of the bolt from any one step of the key, in doing so it made the lock secure against the key being altered to 'half throw' the bolt, enabling the lock easily opened.