Who knew combination locks were so cool?

 I was at the gym this morning fiddling with the dial on my combination lock when it struck me that I had no idea how those darn little things work! Well the good folks at HowStuffWorks.Com have a really instructive tutorial on the inner workings of combination locks and it pretty interesting stuff. There apparently are a series of alternating cams that control the latch, each cam has an indentation. When you dial up the combination numbers or letters, you align the cams and that allows the latch to fit inside the indentations and release! 

So here’s one for idle cocktail party chatter:  According to wikipedia (which I love but I do always try to second source) the first combination lock was created in 1206 by an arab scholar and mechanical engineer (they had mechanical engineers back in the day? Who knew?!)