Last year, my husband and I started looking for a studio or a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that we could buy. To our surprise, we found a six-unit building in our neighborhood that was within our budget. It was rent-stabilized, partially occupied, and in need of repair, which made it undesirable to most purchasers. Still, an inspector told us that it had “good bones.” The building had been in the same family for over a hundred years. A towering fir tree grew in the yard, apparently left over from a Christmas past.

I hired Martin, a contractor originally from Poland, to help improve the apartments. Before opening up a wall, Martin could locate a leak or divine where the electricity and plumbing lines were routed. He took me up to the roof and explained exactly how its slope encouraged water to pool. Watching him work, I felt a sense of awe and shame. My life was obviously too abstract. I had become a stranger to how the world around me functioned. What could I do to change that?

One day, I tried to open an old mailbox on the first floor. There were six slots, but I had only five keys, each of them as small and toylike as the key to a child’s diary. In an effort to open the last slot, I watched a video about lock picking on YouTube and ordered a set of picks from Amazon. Then I spent an hour unsuccessfully poking my new tools into the keyhole. In the end, I called a locksmith, defeated. A shifty young man turned up and, without even giving me his name, broke the lock with a drill. Before he left, though, he told me that there were groups of people who got together to study locks. I looked into it and found the Open Organization of Lockpickers (TOOOL), which originated in Amsterdam. Its members practice something called locksport.

Almost a year later, on a week night in May, I stopped by a weekly TOOOL meeting in the Netherlands. I met five members of the group in front of a large concrete building that once housed a dental school and now hosts an artists’ collective and a hacker space. It was 8 P.M., but the sun was still shining. Jos Weyers, a stocky man with glasses who is one of the group’s senior members, was dressed in all black. He is faster than almost anyone in the world at lock “impressioning”; he can quickly file down a blank key to fit a lock that he has not seen in advance.

We climbed several flights of stairs and entered a room that looked like a tinkerer’s garage. A fridge in the back was stocked with caffeinated drinks. The mood was informal and chatty; Weyers and another member ate takeout noodles. Rob Wiegertjes, an energetic TOOOL member of seventeen years, with a brown goatee, told me his unassuming lock-picking origin story, which began with an old bike lock he’d forgotten the code to. After he cracked it, he moved on to a bucket of disused locks at a movie theatre where he used to work. “I started picking that bucket,” he said.

Most of the locks we encounter on a daily basis, Wiegertjes said, are called pin-tumbler locks. Each lock contains a sequence of spring-loaded pins of different lengths. Each key, meanwhile, features corresponding peaks and valleys. Insert the correct key and the pins lift to a uniform height, clearing the way for the lock to turn.

TOOOL has a rigorous code of ethics. To form an official chapter, members must pledge that they will pick only those locks whose owners have given permission. Locksporters should not pick locks that are actively in use, because of the risk of breaking them. They should also be careful about whom they teach. Weyers turns people away when they seem suspiciously eager. Barry Wels, a co-founder of the Dutch chapter, has a security company that opens safes for clients, but he leaves the room when his work is done. “We are never interested in what is inside your safe,” he says on his website. “It is just not our business.”

Hobbyist lock pickers are not burglars, Weyers said, but people who want to master a practical and tactile skill. Once, a local television station profiled TOOOL and asked its members to dress in black turtlenecks and gloves. “That was not going to happen,” Weyers told me. If you truly wanted to get into a locked space, he pointed out, you would probably break a window or destroy the lock with a drill or a crowbar—unless, that is, you are dealing with certain American doorknobs, which Weyers considers inferior. “You will be able to open them after tonight,” he told me.

The first known pin-tumbler locks were designed by the ancient Egyptians about four thousand years ago. Their pins were made from wooden cylinders, and their keys, which could be two or three feet long, looked like oversized toothbrushes. For millennia, the design of locks didn’t advance very much. Most were “warded locks,” which feature immovable obstructions in the keyhole that block incorrect keys; a cleverly designed pick or skeleton key could overcome them. But locks evolved rapidly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when growing numbers of city dwellers became increasingly concerned about rising theft and the security of their property. Lockmakers introduced moving parts into their creations, and some of them became household names, according to David Churchill, a historian of security technologies at the University of Leeds. In 1824, the British lockmaker Charles Chubb challenged a burglar, who was imprisoned on a ship, to open one of his toughest locks. The burglar was unsuccessful after ten weeks of trying.

Joseph Bramah, another lockmaker, claimed that his so-called Challenge Lock had a one-in-four-hundred-and-seventy-million chance of being opened without its dedicated key. He was so confident that he promised two hundred guineas to anyone who could pick it. The lock sat in a shopwindow for more than sixty years. Then, in 1851, an American lock salesman, Alfred Charles Hobbs, who worked for the lockmakers Day & Newell, managed to pick it. He also picked the Chubb “detector lock,” which had anti-picking booby traps built into it. The story effectively went viral, Churchill told me, and lock-picking competitions briefly exploded in popularity. The Paris Exhibition of 1867 even held a “Battle of the Safes,” in which two rival safe-makers had their wares tested against sledgehammers.

An American, Linus Yale, Jr., invented the pin-tumbler lock that we use today. To prevent burglars from robbing banks, lockmakers devised hidden keyholes that could keep out gunpowder and other explosives, so people couldn’t blow them open. In the eighteen-seventies, after thieves began kidnapping bank managers, James Sargent invented the first commercially successful time lock. It would open only within a specified timeframe, even if you held a gun to someone’s head; bank managers across the country must have slept more soundly. It was a time of great ingenuity, Tom Hennessy, the curator of the Lock Museum of America, in Connecticut, told me. Lockmakers arguably depended on pickers and thieves to keep them in business. When I came across a historical lock that was advertised as pick-proof, I asked Hennessy about it. “There’s no such thing as a pick-proof lock,” he said.

Pin-tumbler locks can be picked because of minor variations between their pins. When you apply tension to the lock, by sticking something into it and turning it slightly, one of the pins will block the lock from opening more than the others do. By pushing that pin with a pick and applying a little more tension, you can get the lock to turn slightly, getting that pin out of the way. Moving sequentially through the other pins, you can eventually raise all of them to the correct level, just as a key would, and open the lock.

In Amsterdam, Wiegertjes demonstrated this process by inserting an L-shaped piece of metal called a tension rod into a padlock. Then he took a slightly curved pick and began pushing on the pins one by one. The first pin seemed springy, so he moved on to the others, feeling for resistance. “Do you feel that?” he asked, handing me the pick. The pin made a slight click as I pushed on it. He took the lock back, softly pressed several other pins, and the lock clicked open.

Weyers handed me a gold doorknob from the United States. “It took me way longer to get out of the shrink wrap than it will to actually pick it,” he said. I put in a borrowed pick and tension rod. He was right: before I could feel much of anything, the knob turned. Next, I tried out a gold padlock. I used the pick to count five pins before I inserted the tension rod. As I concentrated on what I was feeling, my field of vision drifted out of focus. The third pin gave me the most feedback, and I tried pushing it down while applying a little more tension. After a few minutes of fiddling with the other pins, I got it open.

Weyers sat down next to me, attached a clamp to the side of the table, and tightened a lock into it. He was preparing to impression a key. At LockCon in 2024, he had won first place by rapidly impressioning several keys—one took him under three minutes—and more impressioning competitions were coming up. He showed me a blank key with no cuts in it and pushed it into the lock. Then, lifting up his glasses, he examined the key for tiny scratches where the pins had made contact. A deeper scratch suggested a longer pin.

Leaning toward the table, Weyers filed away at the key, periodically putting it back in the lock to check his progress. If a key was cut too deeply, it would never turn the lock, so speed had to be paired with caution. Barely five minutes went by before the lock opened. Meanwhile, I had been picking my third padlock, which made a satisfying click as it opened. “And now you know why we like this,” Wiegertjes said.

The hobby of locksport is a modern phenomenon. For most of history, locksmiths and lockmakers have guarded their secrets as closely as magicians withhold their tricks. When the New York-based locksmith Charles Courtney co-wrote a series of locksmiths’ reference books, in the nineteen-thirties, the F.B.I told him to destroy the volume on lock and safe picking. The information was apparently too dangerous to get out. The police even caught a “yegg”—a safe-cracking burglar, in the parlance of the time—stealing Courtney’s book from a second-story office. The office’s safe was untouched.

In 1997, Steffen Wernéry, who was part of a German hacker group known for getting into NASA’s computer system in the eighties, started the first official locksport group. A year later, a Dutch hacker met the German pickers and founded the Nederlandse Vereniging van Hang- en Sluitsport, or the Dutch Association for Hinges and Locksport. By 2002, the group had disbanded, but some of its members founded TOOOL and went on to launch yearly lock-picking competitions. A U.S. group was formed in 2006. In the meantime, the internet made the secrets of locks public. On a subreddit devoted to lock picking, tens of thousands of weekly visitors swap tricks and earn “belts” as they become more advanced, as one would in karate. The Lockpicking Lawyer, a skilled picker with 4.7 million YouTube followers who keeps his identity secret, sometimes helps manufacturers improve their locks after he bests them. Some of his fans have mailed lingerie to his P.O. Box.

Weyers handed me the key he had just made, as a keepsake. Wiegertjes, in turn, filled my bag with locks on which I could practice. One of the other TOOOL members let me keep the picks I’d borrowed to open my first locks. It was late when I returned to my hotel room, but I immediately got to work on three more padlocks. I fell asleep with a profile-cylinder lock, the kind that fastens many European doors, in my hands.

Once I could pick a lock, I saw the locks in my life differently. I had bought a padlock for a gate that guards our trash bins, but I now knew that it could be opened with little effort. The lock seemed to achieve its goal not because it was impenetrable but because it communicated that the bins were private, and because overcoming it would be slightly more inconvenient than leaving the bins alone. “What is not really appreciated by most people is that they’re perpetually locking themselves in with locks everywhere, and it’s not very hard to pick them,” the physicist Richard Feynman, an amateur lock picker who enjoyed opening his colleagues’ safes while working on the Manhattan Project, once wrote. Feynman viewed locks as the ideal challenge for a puzzle lover: “One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there must be a way to beat it!”

Locks quickly take on symbolism. When you love someone, you exchange keys to communicate that you want to share space. And, when a relationship sours, you change the locks. Harry Houdini was a largely self-taught lock picker; after his death, his wife kept a pair of his handcuffs. If Houdini had somehow managed to survive, they’d agreed, he’d have to prove it by picking the cuffs. In the nineteen-fifties, in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts in London, a member of the Chubb family argued that locks were a stand-in for what was good and bad about humankind. That we need locks at all was a “commentary on man’s amoral nature,” but their evolution was a “testament to his technical and artistic skill.”

The locks that I had opened were simple ones, and I wondered if other locks might have more complex ideas to convey. On a humid day in July, I visited the John M. Mossman Lock Collection, in midtown Manhattan, which is made up of bank and safe locks made between the eighteen-fifties and the early nineteen-hundreds, by such all-stars as the Yale family, Day & Newell, and Sargent. The curator, Ryan Krakowsky, once studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design; he eventually persuaded a locksmith to give him an apprenticeship and now works as a locksmith at Harvard University. Krakowsky has a soft voice and kind eyes, but he leaves one with the impression that he knows more than he’s letting on. Together, we peered inside the wooden cases.

The locks were extraordinary. Linus Yale, Sr., had designed a boomerang-shaped key that was drilled with holes of varying depths. I inserted it into a slot on a lock, as though I were putting a coin into a vending machine; after I turned a knob clockwise, the key was shot back out into my hand. Some keys had adjustable bits so that the shape could be altered at any time. Some locks had multiple overlapping gears that turned hypnotically as the bolts slid open. Many had ornate etchings, even though their designs would be concealed within a vault.

We stopped at an intricate Yale lock once used in the U.S. Treasury Department. Krakowsky recently bought a similar one on Facebook Marketplace from a church. He is aware of only three in the world: the one I was looking at, the one Krakowsky owns, and a third that belongs to a collector he knows. Krakowsky’s personal collection is largely dedicated to a nineteenth-century lockmaker from Boston named George Damon. No casual lock picker could get past a Damon, he assured me. “His vaults are amazing,” he said.

Krakowsky told me that he has no objections to locksporters, “as long as they’re not breaking into things.” (“I do always have a pick with me,” he said, pulling a Swiss Army-style pick set from his pocket.) But he emphasized the difference between learning to pick locks on YouTube and attaining mastery. “Anyone can watch a video on how to paint something, but it doesn’t mean you can paint,” he said. I thought about the pile of padlocks that I had accrued to practice picking. They were basic and plain; I was opening them feverishly to get a quick high. Here, we were revering locks from a distance, through glass. They had been elevated to sculpture-like status—and as a result, I mused, they no longer fulfilled their original job of safeguarding valuables.

As we finished our tour, Krakowsky told me about a warded lock that he hoped to open at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston. In 2025, a group of experts on iron objects had noticed a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century strongbox that Gardner had purchased in 1894, in Italy. The strongbox, which is painted with flowers and birds, has a false keyhole on the front; the real keyhole is hidden underneath a bolt on its lid. The staff realized that there was no record of its having been opened since the museum was founded, in 1903. Working with Kevin Moreau, a blacksmith based in Vermont, Krakowsky had captured footage inside the lock using a video scope. Moreau made a tool to measure the depth and heights of the wards, to make a replica of what the original key probably looked like.

A week later, I took a train to Boston. The museum was closed to the public, but Krakowsky and I were welcomed in, and we made our way to a dimly lit gallery. We found the box on a table; behind it, a large tapestry depicted the founder of the Persian Empire receiving a letter that was hidden inside a rabbit. A few museum staffers were stationed nearby. During Krakowsky’s previous visit, the key wouldn’t turn, and he’d had to send it back to Moreau for adjustments. Krakowsky, wearing blue gloves, pulled out the modified key. It was about the length of my hand, with a rectangular head that had a cross cut into its middle.

I asked Dee Duarte, the curatorial assistant, what she thought was inside the box. It was probably empty, she told me. She wasn’t sure if Gardner had ever opened it. Soon, Krakowsky was standing next to the box. A hush fell over the group as he placed the key in the hole and began to turn.

“Still a little tight,” he said. The box made a loud clank. “That’s a good noise.” There were a couple more clanks, and he called out, “Here we go!” The lid lifted up, and the staff rushed to look.

“Are those matches?” Duarte said.

I looked inside. I could see about a hundred loose matches wrapped in brown paper, along with two more boxes of matches. There was also a wrapped parcel with Gardner’s husband’s name scrawled on it.

“No key in there?” Krakowsky asked quietly. He’d been hoping to compare the original with the one that he and Moreau had made.

No one answered him. The staffers had turned their attention to the mysterious parcel.

Krakowsky was still working on the key, filing it down so that it would turn more smoothly next time. Watching him, I understood that, even in this museum filled with beautiful objects, he saw the lock itself as the work of art. For locksporters, lock collectors, and enthusiasts, locks are often of greater value than what they lock up. I later found out what was in the parcel: even more matches. In the end, they were thrown out, but the iron strongbox—now open—remained on display.

I learned to pick my first lock because I wanted to be a more useful person, to navigate my world more competently. Perhaps I was never going to learn this, exactly, from lock enthusiasts. They seemed to be on a different quest; they loved the locks themselves. Still, as time passes, the apartment building that inspired my venture into lock picking is becoming less of a mystery to me. I figured out how the pilot light of the water heater works—even if I nearly burned off my eyebrows in the process. I ripped out a drop ceiling with a friend, although I did need my contractor Martin’s help to patch a hole.

I also installed a wall-mounted mailbox in the hallway so that tenants could drop off rent checks. The other day, I stopped by to empty the box, only to realize that I didn’t have the key. I was standing there, worrying about being late for my next appointment, when I realized that my picks were at the bottom of my bag. I inspected the lock. It was artless—Krakowsky wouldn’t have given it a second glance—but I did see pins. With one hand, I inserted a tension rod and turned it gently. With the other, I felt my way through the pins one by one, and the box swung open. ♦