Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

[left-of-center2012]

A Canadian man unlocked a safe that had sat unopened in a small museum for decades, cracking the code on his first try with a lucky guess. Stephen Mills was visiting the Vermilion Heritage Museum with his family when he had a go at opening the iron box "for a laugh".

The museum in the province of Alberta had previously tried numerous times to unlock the old safe - to no avail. The safe had not been opened since the late 1970s. The museum, housed in an old brick school building, hosts a collection on the history of Vermilion, a town of just over 4,000 people. Mr Mills, from Fort McMurray, Alberta, was visiting Vermilion with his extended family during a long weekend in May.

The family brought the children to see the museum and was given a tour by volunteer Tom Kibblewhite. One of the exhibits was a safe that had originally been in the town's Brunswick Hotel, which had opened in 1906. The museum had previously enlisted the help of experts to crack the code, tried default combinations, and had contacted former hotel employees to see if they could help. Like the Mills family, other museum visitors played around with trying to open it, with no success.

He noticed the dial numbers ran from zero to 60, and decided to try 20-40-60. "Typical combination lock, three times clockwise - 20 - two times counterclockwise - 40 - once clockwise - 60, tried the handle and it went," he said. Mr Kibblewhite told the BBC "it was a thrill" when he turned and saw the door swinging open.

So what was in the safe?
Sadly no treasure. It contained an old pay sheet and part of a restaurant order pad, dating from the late 1970s. The pad included receipts for a mushroom burger for C$1.50 ($1.12; £0.59) and a package of cigarettes for C$1.00.

What are the chances?
The odds of Mr Mills correctly guessing the combination are pretty long, says the University of Toronto's Jeffrey Rosenthal, author of Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything. He calculated the chance of correctly guessing the combination on one try as 1 in 216,000.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48477081

[House of Roberts]

1. Are they sure that safe wasn't once owned by Al Capone?

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Many people never change the combination from what was set at the factory.

When he was at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman found he could open many of the 'secure' safes storing classified info on the atomic bomb project with the combinations 0-50-0 or 50-0-50.