At 1851’s Great Exhibition, locksmiths offered prizes to anyone who could defeat their so-called “unpickable” locks. This hugely successful marketing stunt heralded the modern security industry, with vendors stoking fears of Sophisticated Hackers™ to create demand for expensive high-tech security solutions, while daring safe-breakers kept finding ways to thwart even the most impenetrable so-called “burglar proof” safe. In this talk we’ll meet some notorious characters from this now-forgotten golden age of safecracking. We’ll take a look at their criminal exploits, and how safecrackers’ methods and security countermeasures evolved over a century.