13 ms·
Berlin Key
- woozyolliew 7y agoDiscovered via tweet: https://twitter.com/historyned/status/1178272006334242819?s=21 https://twitter.com/historyned/status/1178272006334242819?s=... Seems like an elegant, physical embodiment of resource acquisition, state management, and release. Albeit uncomfortable in your pocket. Comparisons to C++ std:: on some of these counts may be valid.
- adrianmonk 7y agoThis is super clever, but I bet some of its potential applications conflict with egress safety requirements/laws. (If a door is part of an exit route, you probably can't require a key to open it.)
- michaelmior 7y agoIt seems like you could have a similar system which also has some type of internal lever to release the lock although I assume this wasn't part of the original design.
- Someone 7y agoNot really. When you can open it from the inside without using a key, you can then also leave it open without that key being inserted into the door, if necessary by propping up something to the door to prevent it from closing itself (from what I understand, you could even use the door’s bolt for that; if you close the bolt while the door is open, you can remove your key, and the door can’t be closed without a key) I doubt that’s theoretical. Kids playing in the garden and on the street could easily use that ploy.
- tragiclos 7y agoThat would defeat the purpose of the key design, which is to ensure that you lock the door behind you.
- gumby 7y agoGood point, but I doubt those rules existed anywhere in 1912 when this key was invented.
- mongol 7y agoMakes me wonder: how are prisons handling fire safety?
- karmakaze 7y ago"Also, locking an open door is usually not possible." A good feature to have on otherwise normal doors so that they only ways to lock it is to be inside or outside with the key. I now have a greater appreciation for deadbolts.
- overcast 7y agoThis is what I did when I moved into my house. Dead bolts only, and dummy handles below.
- allannienhuis 7y agodeadbolts can still have a key on the outside & a paddle-knob on the inside. That's the normal case here in Canada.
- overcast 7y agoRight, but I can't lock myself out with one.
- sandworm101 7y agoA lock-only-with-key door would be seriously slow. It couldnt work in high-traffic area, the sorts of places we now use keyless entry.
- Zak 7y agoThe driver's door of most German cars behaves that way too, or used to. For Americans used to opening the door, pressing the lock, then closing the door, this can give the impression the lock is broken.
- 7373737373 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr
- simias 7y agoWhy are you posting this? It doesn't appear related to the OP insofar as they are both encountered in Berlin. Also this clock design seems unnecessarily inefficient. Why divide 24 hours in multiple of 5 hours instead of the much more natural 6? This way it would be a lot easier to decode AM/PM. I realize that it's about art more than practicality but I don't really understand why that encoding was chosen.
- 7373737373 7y agoWhy not? The post is about weird artifacts in Berlin. This clock may be the key to solving a crypto puzzle.
- nstom 7y agoI think it has to do with design. They wanted to make the two top rows have the same amount of lights. Using 6 would mean one row of 6 lights and one of 4. 5^2 is the smallest square that provides enough values to fit 24 hours.
- cryptozeus 7y agoVideo showing how it is used, really neat! https://youtu.be/UW4jZLEgaiU https://youtu.be/UW4jZLEgaiU
- whoisjuan 7y agoSomething that isn't entirely clear to me from the video. Do you have to push it from the inside to retrieve it outside? Because that would be super annoying.
- beatgammit 7y agoHow so? The only time you use the lock, you are leaving or entering, and the key forces you to lock the door in order to retrieve the key on the other side.
- whoisjuan 7y agoIt would be be better if once I unlock it, the key gets pushed by some mechanical spring, instead of me manually having to push it from the unlocking side to get it on the locking side.
- pzh 7y agoIt seems that you can accidentally, or not, lock the door without fully closing it, thus leaving it essentially unlocked, so the key isn’t quite fool-proof.
- coldtea 7y ago>so the key isn’t quite fool-proof Yes, it's from another era, when the consumer was not expected to be a fool...
- vinay427 7y agoThat's one way to describe problematic design. In other words, the key doesn't fulfill its intended purpose considering (as the comment you replied to noted) one can do this either accidentally or not which can have little to do with being a fool.
- odiroot 7y agoI'm surprised some houses still use this. As it's impossible to leave the building without a key in case of a fire. I suspect it may even be illegal today.
- esrauch 7y agoAs an American living in Switzerland one thing that has consistently surprised me is the difference in fire safety rules: not having any smoke alarm or fire extinguishers in homes is common, and it's also common to be able to lock people inside rooms/apartments/buildings so that they can't leave without having a key. It's possible to lock someone in my apartment even if they have the key if the door is locked with the key left in on the other side. In the US if I checked out a rental home as a possible place to live and it had any one room where you could lock someone in and they would be trapped I'd wonder what weird shit happened there.
- decebalus1 7y agoDon't know about Switzerland, but as an European living in the US, I think the American fire safety rules are what they are mainly because most houses here are basically matchstick houses built from prefab low quality wood which would get devoured by flames in minutes. And the fire-resistant building materials are super toxic when they actually burn. So fire is a very big deal... Anecdotal, we had a fire in my building because the wrong type of lightbulbs were installed in the hallways and because of their size, they were too close to the drywall which in turn caught fire. So.. yeah. Matchstick.
- _jal 7y agoI stayed in a house in Germany in which the walls were filled with dried-straw for insulation. It was several hundred years old. There was a no-smoking rule.
- atoav 7y ago> There was a no-smoking rule. Which to be honest says not a lot about anything, because this isn't that unusual in Central Europe. Also: a lot of the old wooden houses are far better in terms of fire resistance than you'd suspect on first glance, wood often outperforms concrete and steel when it comes to structural integrity in a fire. I don't know about the straw thing, I only know it mixed with clay.
- Someone 7y agoThe English description on that page doesn’t make it easy to understand what this key does. ”Its name comes from the fact that it has two key blades (the part which activates the bolt) at each end of the key, rather than the usual single blade” How does that lead to the name “Berlin key” or either of the German names? I would guess “Berlin key” comes from the fact that it predominantly is used in Berlin. ”After unlocking the lock, the key must be pushed all the way through the lock and retrieved on the other side of the door after it has been closed and locked again” I think the main features are: - the key cannot be removed when the lock is open. - you can remove the key from the other side of the door from which it was inserted. It seems you can lock the door from the side it was unlocked from, and remove the key from that side, too. You only have to push it all the way through if you want the door closed and locked with you and the key on the other side of the door. I also think you can close the lock and remove your key when the door is open.
- atoav 7y agoThe Berlin key ("Berliner Schlüssel") was mostly used in tenements with multiple backyard houses with a common front gate that should be closed at certain times. These kind of arrangements were mostly used in Berlin, hence the name. The other German names for the key describe different aspects of it: "Durchsteckschlüssel" translates to "push-through-key" and "Doppelschlüssel" translates to "double-key". If you are more curious about the thing, there is a book by philosopher Bruno Latour on the Berlin Key where he describes the thing with the sociological situation that lead to it if I remember correctly (was a few years ago when I read it). Edit: The basic idea is that in this kind of multi-party environment they wanted to make sure the door is always locked in the evening (when people return). To unlock the door you have to push the key through. Once you are inside you can get the key back, but only if you lock the door behind you. So once the door is locked, it stays locked, unless someone from the inside leaves it open on purpose. This way people cannot "forget" to leave it open.
- mwilcox 7y agohttp://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-36-Berliner-KEY-GBpdf.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-36-Berliner...
- Vaslo 7y agoIs there a technical analogue to this?
- pletnes 7y agoWhat is the closest crypto analog to this kind of key?
- jchook 7y agoProbably normal symmetrical key encryption with some kind of companion software. I think the physical key has the same blade shape on either side. The companion software would decrypt the ciphertext but prevent exporting the cleartext, forcing the user to first re-encrypt the text first.
- simias 7y agoNot really crypto but the only thing that comes to mind would be some RAII lock. You have to re-lock the resource as a side effect of leaving the function (dropping the lock). That's a bit far-fetched though.
- singron 7y agoI think it depends how you translate the locking analog. E.g. decrypting your key with {gpg,ssh}-agent keeps the plaintext key in memory in the agent. If the machine reboots or a timeout elapses, the memory is cleared and the key has to be unlocked again.
- alister 7y agoOn-the-fly encryption, Truecrypt as the canonical example, has this property too. The key is always in memory, decrypting text on the fly, but a reboot or period of inactivity will wipe the key.
- aloknnikhil 7y agohttp://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-36-Berliner-KEY-GBpdf.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-36-Berliner... This is the original technical document on this key.
- Sniffnoy 7y agoThat is not correct. This is an essay by sociologist Bruno Latour about the key, not a technical document.
- mpweiher 7y agoMy house in Berlin, the Corbusierhaus[1][2], used to have this type of key for the front (car) gate. The gate was usually open, and then couldn't be locked with the key. If the gate was closed, it could only be left again in the closed state. The house is next to the Olympic Stadium, so the gates are closed when there's a football game, concert or other event. [1] http://www.corbusierhaus-berlin.de http://www.corbusierhaus-berlin.de [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unité_d'Habitation_of_Berlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unité_d'Habitation_of_Berlin
- pimlottc 7y agoA bit off topic, but how do you like living in the Corbusierhaus?
- viburnum 7y agoAny sociologists want to summarize the Latour essay?
- efls 7y agoI'll take a shot. The subtitle of the essay is "Doing Words with Things", which is a reversal of the famous essay of John L. Austin "Doing Things with Words". Austin pointed out that words have practical effects. Consider the speech act 'I do', when two partners marry: it are the words that have a specific effect in real life. Now Latour claims that we -- philosophers, sociologists, but others as well -- have to pay attention to the effects material objects have on people interacting with them. He claims that a specific way of acting can be inscribed in an artifact. So the key is an example of this: you can only take your key out, if you lock the door behind you. Rather than having a message next to the door saying "Please lock the door behind you", this type of behaviour is enforced through the artifact itself. So social mores or norms can be inscribed in and enacted through material objects (and not just through words). At least that's an ELI5 version of what the essay intends to convey.
- niklasd 7y agoI've actually came across this key in an apartment building in Berlin once, so they really are still in use. The person living there did complain about it though, as (at least in the evening) you had to collect guests from the main gate and escort them back there when they leave, since using the key was the only way to open it. Understandably this is quite annoying when you're living at the fourth floor.
- mordechai9000 7y agoI suppose this is now superseded by modern locks, but this is a great example of solving a problem with technology that would otherwise be left up to human behavior. You could ask people to please make sure to lock the door, but there would always be people who would forget, or just not care enough to bother.
- adrianmonk 7y agoSo Aldi shopping carts and Berlin keys are isomorphic. You stick your token in, you gain access to a facility, and then to get your token back, you must restore the facility to its proper state. Additionally, in both cases, the facility you're unlocking happens to involve physically moving an object around.
- wongarsu 7y agoThat's all Germany shopping carts, not just Aldi. Though I suppose Aldi has the largest international presence.
- GordonS 7y agoIt's not just Aldi, the same thing has been common for decades at some Tesco, Morrisons, Lidl etc stores.
- pimlottc 7y agoThis is standard behavior for shopping carts (trolleys) in Australia as well.
- bigbaguette 7y agoOn a side note, what is the rationale behind the fact that there are doors that can be locked without a key? The horror stories of having the door slammed and getting trapped while outside are so common. If a key was necessary no matter what to lock a door, this wouldn't happen and people wouldn't have to spend a kidney calling a locksmith in the middle of the night.
- Macha 7y agoIn certain areas, the risk of forgetting to lock the door after returning and having someone unwanted make their way in to the house is higher than the risk of getting locked out after forgetting a key. There is a larger group of areas where this is perceived to be true, even if it isn't.
- anon91831837 7y agoLockPickingLawyer has entered the chat
- sebastianconcpt 7y agoThe mechanism makes it impossible to forget to lock the door, without also forgetting the key in the lock. Also, locking an open door is usually not possible.
- Schmazo 7y agoI'm reminded of an old Weekly World News article in which a man tiring of losing his keys so often took the drastic step of having a surgeon implant keys at the end of of his fingers, so he could never lose a key again! The photo they used to accompany the outrageous story was hilarious. Nowadays, that doesn't seem as far-fetched of an idea, with somewhat similar futuristic key implant methods becoming more readily available.
- barking 7y agoIt's kind of confusing but easier to understand when you consider the primary goal which is to force people to lock the door. This is achieved by only allowing the key to be inserted or removed when it's in the locked position. The push through is to allow them to lock the door on either side. 1: it's a key that can only be inserted or removed when in the locked position. 2: It can be only be pushed from one side to the other when in the unlocked position Therefore you can unlock the door on one side to let someone in, lock the door on the same side and remove your key again. Alternatively you can unlock the door then push the key to the other side, lock the door on the other side and remove your key.
- cyborgx7 7y agoMy father lives in Berlin, and before his last move a few years ago he had one of these for his house key. Never knew they were so specific to Berlin.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago> The mechanism makes it impossible to forget to lock the door, without also forgetting the key in the lock. Which I have done, multiple times.