A crooked key

October 2023

When I was younger (heh), I wondered from time to time whether such circumstances exist, in which a simple mechanical lock with a key in it would somehow lock itself by accident, without a human turning the key, and what would such circumstances require. Perhaps I was worrying about the possibility of the event in which the key on the outside of the bathroom door would somehow jerk into the locked position by itself (not by a prank by fellow students) and I would end up locked inside the bathroom or something of the sort. Since I hadn't joined the workforce yet then and the direction my eventual career would take was yet in as dark a dark as the dark matter* I had to cover for all possible eventualities and so I had to think also of the possibility I would become a spy. And since spies and special agents have to be able to rappel using a spider web, dodge bullets in slow motion and lock a door lock with a thought, I tried to think of a way of how it would be possible to achieve the latter. (I decided it is best to leave abseiling from skyscrapers down a thread from a spider's ass to some Tom Cruise or Bourne movie.) Since the thought usually led nowhere, it was always soon pushed away, only to come by from time to time in the passing years and decades.

Playing with this thought was so fruitless, or perhaps the outside world presented more serious demands, that I eventually completely forgot about it, stashed it in some chest in the attic and locked it away. But one day, a couple of years ago at home, out of the blue … I come out of the bathroom, turn slightly to meticulously extinguish the lights, close the door behind me and clunk! the key on the other side turns and locks the door from inside the bathroom. Now no one is in the bathroom, except, well, the key is, the door is locked and we have no way to unlock it. How did this happen? A quick flashback through my thoughts, but I have to ignore it for the moment as there is this situation of the locked door to deal with. It was one of those internal doors with a large keyhole that houses a simple key that is basically a thick round stub with a couple of perpendicular dented protrusions at the end. To my experience, with such internal doors it is usually so that a key will work for a number of doors within the home. So I thought to try and push the key out of the keyhole and then try the keys from the other doors if any would work, but no luck, the key on the other side wasn't aligned with the keyhole and so it was not possible to push it out. Ok, minor problem, unscrew the whole door lock assembly and voila, a number of cusswords later the thing was solved.

Actually, I think the mechanism how this happened is pretty simple. The stub of the key in question is bent (was then and still is, for some now forgotten reason), like this:

I guess when you turn the key to unlock the door it can happen that you leave it in some non-final position, because it does not rotate smoothly due to the crooked stub grinding heavily against all possible inner workings of the door lock. And so if the stub gets stuck, due to friction, mid-rotation in some non-final and non-equilibrium position, it becomes practically spring-loaded and then a stronger vibration, say slamming the door, could unjam it from its then-current position and … well, the pent up spring-loaded energy would turn it, to one side or the other, depending on the circumstances. (I prefer this explanation to having ghosts playing pranks in our home.) Now I guess with some experimenting it would be possible to learn how to purposefully have a bent key perform the desired action upon a known trigger, say closing the door with a certain amount of force or … and so on and so forth. You get the idea: once you know it, you can't unlearn it.

What amazes me here is the serendipity of this whole thing. I have been occasionally playing with the thought of how it would be possible to achieve something like this for a long time, never got anywhere in my thought experiments (ok, I haven't really thought-experimented much, I ain't no Einstein) and then some damaged key performs the trick by accident.** But on the other hand, without my antecedent decades-long interest in this question I might have missed the beauty or the meaning of this occurrence. I mean, even if things are serendipitous, you need to be prepared and on the lookout, if you want to be able to spot them. It's like Charles Goodyear getting mad at the gooey rubber substance with which he had been fruitlessly experimenting for years and throwing it on the hot stove (together with sulphur, that is) and thus accidentally inventing modern resistant rubber. Or the discovery of penicillin, when you are a microbiologist called Alexander Flemming, come back from a vacation, find out you forgot some Petri dish open that is now contaminated with a mold and notice that the contamination shows to have anti-bacterial capabilities.

On the other hand, I guess for a large swath of things from the physical world it holds true that they cannot be discovered in any other way but by accident. In mathematics or philosophy, you can go by by dwelling entirely within the theoretical world, new concepts can be invented merely by digging deeper into the essence, by pushing further the existing line of thought. But how could, say, prehistoric humans have learned that by firing clay they could obtain earthenware pottery? You can't conjure that. I guess it has to happen by coincidence, but you have to be there to witness it and thus learn it. Similarly, you can't brute think metal from its ore, but you discover it comes from there in certain circumstances. Much as you can't calculate that alloying copper and tin gives bronze (which is way more useful than copper), but you must be there to notice it when it happens, whether it happens by accident or by some more intentional line of action.

* Not that my career ever had any better idea about where it was going

** I am guessing that any decent hands-on engineer or MacGyver would be able to imagine and invent a method for a door to perform this thing and wouldn't need to rely on serendipity. Not my league though

Ivo Makuc, 2023
byguesswork@gmail.com