The Curious Case of the Salamander Safe

Pull up a chair. Crack open a beer or pour yourself a glass of wine. This particular blog entry will be a tad longer than usual. Stick with it, though ... it has an interesting finish.

The story starts almost 24 years ago, in April of 1986, when Marilynn and I purchased our house in Cranbury, NJ. Included with the purchase (by default) was a huge, virtually immovable, cast iron safe in the basement. This safe (shown below) is enormous, measuring 37"x35"x24" (HxWxD) and weighing somewhere around 800 pounds: 

 

Here's the shot of the interior of the safe:

 

While the safe itself was open, the door was in the locked position. Iron bolts protruding from the bottom and sides of the door (which fit into corresponding holes on the inside frame of the safe) prevented the safe door from being closed. The knob attached to the front of the safe (presumably for manipulating the bolts) would not budge. Here's a close-up of the inside of the door with an arrow pointing to one of the troublesome bolts.

The safe had a funky lock on the center of the door with a thin slit in it to insert a key. Miraculously, we actually had that key! It was with a pile of other old keys that the previous owner had left us.

 

Inserting the key into the lock caused a small metal button on the lock itself to pop out, but it didn't unlock the door. The knob on the safe still refused to turn and the rounded bolts protruding from the door could not be retracted for love nor money. That left us with a safe that could not be closed, i.e., a worthless safe.

In truth, it wasn't an entirely worthless safe. It had a purpose, albeit one that its 19th century makers could not have envisioned. For about 15 years, it functioned as an incredibly sturdy TV stand for a black and white television hooked up to a Nintendo console. It also doubled as a storage chest for all of our kids' Warhammer armies. Sadly, it had lost most of it's glamour over the years, but don't we all?

A few years ago, in order to make room for some additional exercise equipment in the basement, Dave and I managed to roll it under the basement stairs. It wasn't easy to maneuver that beast, let me tell you, but we did it. And I had no intention of ever moving it again. But fate intervened.

Last month, following Mullen Christmas in Cranbury, my daughter, Sara, and her husband, Pete, returned to Rhode Island and discovered that their house had been burglarized. The thieves ransacked the place and managed to find all of their most expensive possessions wherever they were hidden. The very next day, Marilynn and I rolled the safe out from under the basement stairs and gave it one more look. My plan was to learn as much as I could about it and enlist the aid of a locksmith to fix it.

I started by examining the identifying plate affixed to the front of the safe. Below is an image of a plate on eBay which is identical to the one on my safe:

This told me that it was an "Improved Defiance Salamander Safe" manufactured by a company in New York called "R.M. Patrick". Painstaking examination of the lock (see the close up image earlier in this post) yielded the following bits of text: "Goffin", "Patent", "MAR. 54", and "1251". Armed with this information, I spent the better part of a Saturday exploring the web. Here's what I discovered:

• The lock on the safe was patented by a man name F.C. Goffin in March of 1854. Unfortunately, the patent number was not 1251 and the U.S. Patent Office search engine was abysmal. I literally had to inspect every single patent issued in the United States in March of 1854. It was as painstaking as it sounded, but, just before I was about to give up, I hit pay dirt. Patent number 10660 provided me with a perfect description of the lock on my safe and how it worked. [Update: as of 2021, the U.S. Patent Search has been vastly improved.]
• A "Salamander Safe" refers to a fireproof safe, so named because the salamander, according to myth, is supposed to be able to endure fire without harm.
• R.M. Patrick was a manufacturer of Defiance Salamander Safes at 192 Pearl Street in New York City.

While all of this was great information, I was amazed and frustrated by my inability to find any information at all about my particular safe. Having details about the lock was fantastic, but it would have been nice to know how that lock had been integrated into the safe. This lack of information would come back to haunt me later.

My next order of business was to contact a competent locksmith who specialized in antique safes. After a few searches on the web I found a site called AllExperts that looked promising. I entered my problem on the website and, within a few hours, received a response from a safe expert in California. After exchanging a number of emails, the California expert -- after expressing his regret at not being able to work on my safe personally -- gave me the name of an individual in New Jersey that might be able to help me, a guy by the name of Jeff Sitar.

I searched the web and found Jeff's email address and phone number. I sent him detailed information about my safe but received no reply. So I gave him a call and left a message on his answering machine. Still nothing. I was just about ready to give up on Jeff when he returned my call at 8pm one night. (It turns out that Jeff is a pretty busy guy!) I described the Salamander safe problem to him and he was immediately interested. He then pointed me to his website which described him as a championship safecracker, and I was immediately interested! 

 

 

After a number of abortive attempts to meet, I finally got Jeff and my safe together last Saturday. The results were truly astounding.

Jeff showed up and got to work immediately. He began by taking off the inner plate of the safe door and exposing the interior of the door. As he expected, it was completely encased in concrete:

 

 

Jeff then carefully chipped away about 50 pounds of concrete to expose the locking mechanisms.

 

 

In the photo above, the Goffin lock is in the center. To the right of that lock is a horizontal bar which controls the movement of all of the iron bolts. That horizontal bar is free to move only after two things happen: the Goffin lock must be opened and the second metal bar fitting into the horizontal bar must be raised. See the close-up below:

 

I went upstairs at this point to do some work in the kitchen while Jeff tried to figure out how to raise that second metal bar. I was upstairs for no more than 2 minutes when I heard him yell, "Paul, come down here and look at this. You will not believe it!!!"

I ran downstairs thinking that Jeff had discovered a second lock requiring a second key, but it was much, much better than that. When he pulled up on the metal bar that was restraining the horizontal bar, a small piece of metal on the front of the safe moved. Go to the top of this blog and click on the very first safe picture. Notice a tiny bit of gold-colored molding on the upper left portion of the safe? A close up of that bit of molding is shown below:

 

As it turns out, that's a tiny bit of brass that is attached to a lever that raises the restraining bar. When the Goffin lock is open, pressing down on this brass switch raises the restraining bar and allows the doorknob to turn and extend or retract all of the iron bolts. The locking mechanism of the safe was in perfect working order all these years ... we just didn't know its secret! 

Jeff was both exhilarated and humbled: exhilarated because, after 30 years in the trade, he had just learned something brand new, but humbled because he had to take the door of the safe apart to figure it out. Me, I was just happy to have a fully working, almost impenetrable, antique fireproof safe in absolutely perfect working order!

As long as this story was, it may actually have a postscript. Stay tuned ...

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Postscript: September 5, 2021

A few days ago I was notified by a reader that a lot of the original links in this post were broken. Thinking that the website had gone awry, I quickly investigated. As it turns out, the website was fine but, sadly, my safecracker was not. Jeff Sitar died on February 22, 2019. Per this obituary, he was extremely well-known within his trade and was an eight-time champion of the Lockmasters Safe Manipulation contest. The FBI, DEA, Homeland Security and the Secret Service were among his clients. The Los Angeles Times called him "the Michael Jordon of safe-cracking". He was a consultant on a number of "heist films" and was featured in this article by the New York Times a year before he died. Why the article didn't include his amazing work at my house in 2010 is a mystery to me.