Protection, Inc.

CORPORATIONS Protection Inc.

While a military guard stood at attention, the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, temporarily kept in the Library of Congress, were put this week in their permanent home in the National Archives Exhibition Hall. Their home is a big glass showcase which, at the touch of a button, sinks slowly through the floor into a huge vault in the cellar. The 50-ton safe, a bombproof, thiefproof, fireproof stronghold with 15-in. thick walls and 5-ton armored doors will keep the historic documents as safe as the gold in Fort Knox. By day, the documents will be on exhibition; at night, they will repose in the $30,000 vault built by the Mosler Safe Co., "the biggest--and trickiest--safe in the world."

Hidden Assets. By taking on such jobs, the 104-year-old Mosler Safe Co. has become the world's largest safemaker. It built the huge vaults at Fort Knox, designed the complex system of precision locks which close the cell blocks of Alcatraz Prison. So many Tokyo banks installed Mosler's vaults that when the U.S. Army was searching for hidden hoards of Japanese gold and securities, Mosler could give them all the detailed floor plans they needed as well as shrewd hints where to look.

Today, three out of four U.S. bank vaults, and half of all private safes, are Moslers. They hold, says President Edwin Mosler, two-thirds of the world's negotiable wealth, along with such oddments as the gold spike which joined the first transcontinental railroad, a set of George Washington's false teeth and all the United Nations treaties. Mosler makes everything from a $25 insulated cashbox for householders to a $1,000,000, two-story vault.

Safekeeping. Mosler's great-grandfather, a German immigrant, started out by making wheelbarrows. Later he switched to strongboxes, and before long his safes, with bulls' heads and baskets of fish painted on the doors, were standard equipment in most butchers' and fish dealers' shops.

The company sells its product by plugging "the dangers of fire and theft. Says Mosler: "There are four times as many crooks as policemen in the U.S., and they commit more than 1,000 burglaries a day. Four out of every ten firms that lose their records in a fire go out of business." Safecrackers keep Mosler's designers on their toes. The cracksmen keep up with the latest technology and quickly find any weak spot in a new design.

Recently, when Mosler offered a booklet. What You Should Know About Safes, one request came from a burglar serving a life term in the Texas State Prison. "When puzzle locks [i.e., combination locks] were first used a century ago," said Mosler, "crooks devised the 'drag,' a powerful screw to crush the walls around the lock. When the walls were strengthened, they took to the jackscrew to force wedges between the door and the jamb. When safe doors were built with bolts that slid into the jamb on all four sides, safecrackers began blowing gunpowder around the door with an air pump. Now they use nitroglycerin, acetylene torches and power drills."

Mosler's biggest problem is that he can't design a foolproof owner. Many a safe-owner picks a combination based on his address or birth date because it is easy to remember. But smart crooks, says Mosler, look up such information as a matter of simple routine in casing a job. Though harder to remember, the safest combination is a meaningless one.

Wide Open. Government requirements that business records be kept for from one to ten years have given Mosler's sales a big boost. (In ten years, they have more than tripled.) Another big sales stimulator has been the atom bomb. For such customers as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., Mosler has built a bombproof stronghold for records 30 feet below Metropolitan's Manhattan headquarters, which even a direct hit will not destroy. (A Mosler vault in Hiroshima's Teikoku Bank, only 300 yards from the center of the atom bomb's blast, was unbreached, and the bank was rebuilt around it.)

The Right Combination. Mosler's most promising new idea is its "Snorkel Auto-Teller" for curbstone banking. A customer can drive up to the Snorkel, a gadget the size of a gas pump, do business with a clerk several feet below the sidewalk through a system of microphones, mirrors, and an elevator, without leaving his car.

As a devout apostle of protection, Edwin Mosler has a safe in every room, and another in almost every closet of his summer home at Deal, NJ. and his Manhattan apartment. "Better safe than sorry," he tells visitors with a grin. However, he candidly admits "no safe is completely safe. Anything one man makes, another can break."

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