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Comment by jimmcslim | Hacker News Reader

1 in 216000... seems like you could build some robotic device to brute force that pretty easily... or you know, introduce it to a thermic lance.

EDIT: sorry, my research suggests that safe-cracking with thermic lances is plausible but not practical (source; Mythbusters, of course)

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Irrespective of how practical thermic lances are, the likelihood that there would be something more valuable inside the safe than the safe itself was low (that’s also confirmed now by the actual contents of the safe) and that’s probably why destructive opening of the safe was never even considered.

The safe itself was the exhibition piece that was valuable to the museum. Destroying it just to get at its unknown but probably boring contents would have been pointless.

Sure, but an unopened safe with mysterious contents is a better attraction :)

Actually, having that and letting visitors try is really cool.

or maybe with a handheld x-ray like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovqJpcaWD7o

but not with every safe:

"Some modern safe locks are made of lightweight materials such as nylon to inhibit this technique, since most safe exteriors are made of much denser metals"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-cracking#Radiological_met...

Not that this was a modern safe (Thought to be bought in 1907)

A brute-force robot was my first thought too. It's been done a bunch of times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fTz2D6x20U

+1 for using a robotic cracking device, I would go as far to say that a good hacker could whip something up in a weekend that would have cracked this.

Automatic lock bruteforcers make an occasional appearance on HN and Hackaday:

https://hackaday.com/2011/03/09/automatic-lock-cracker-makes...

Well yeah, but that would almost certainly have destroyed the contents, which turned out to be all paper.

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