Safe
The first known safe dates back to the 13th century BC and was found in the tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses II.
[1] In the 16th century, blacksmiths in southern Germany, Austria, and France first forged cash boxes in sheet iron.
[2] In the 17th century, in northern Europe, iron safes were sometimes made in the shape of a barrel, with a padlock on top.
Fire-resistant record protection equipment consists of self-contained devices that incorporate insulated bodies, doors, drawers or lids, or non-rated multi-drawer devices housing individually rated containers that contain one or more inner compartments for storage of records.
For larger volumes of heat-sensitive materials, a modular room-sized vault is much more economical than purchasing and storing many fire rated safes.
Typically these room-sized vaults are utilized by corporations, government agencies and off-site storage service firms.
These vaults utilize ceramic fiber, a high temperature industrial insulating material, as the core of their modular panel system.
Like the data-rated (Class 125) structures, these vault systems employ ceramic fiber insulation and components rated to meet or exceed the required level of protection.
In recent years room-sized Class 125 vaults have been installed to protect entire data centers.
In the UK, the BS EN-1047 standard is set aside for data and document safes to determine their ability to withstand prolonged intense heat and impact damage.
[9] In the United States, both the writing of standards for fire-resistance and the actual testing of safes is performed by Underwriters Laboratories.
Very small secure enclosures known as key safes, opened by entering a combination, are attached to the wall of a building to store the keys allowing access, so that they are available only to a person knowing the combination, typically for holiday lets, carers, or emergency use.
Physicist Richard Feynman gained a reputation for safe-cracking while working on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War.
[14] UL provides a variety of fire rating classifications, 125, 150, and 350 representing the maximum internal temperature in degrees Fahrenheit the safe may not exceed during the test.
[17] The test might take hours to run and can be repeated as many times as the UL staff feel necessary to ensure that all prospective avenues of attack have been thoroughly explored.
In addition to those requirements, the safe must weigh at least 750 pounds or come with instructions for anchoring, and have body walls of material equivalent to at least 1" open hearth steel with a minimum tensile strength of 50,000 psi.
