The year was 1874

• Levi Strauss receives a patent for blue jeans
• First public zoo in the United States opens in Philadelphia, Pa.

Meanwhile . . .

It was a year that marked the beginning of a mammoth construction job for us. We had just recently changed our name from Diebold & Kienzle to Diebold, Norris & Company to reflect a new partner. The job? Oh, nothing special. We had just been asked to build the biggest bank vault the world had ever seen. The customer was a San Francisco safe deposit company.

We won the contract against a dozen other bidders. The price tag: $100,000. It would take us months to complete the vault and lead to our near bankruptcy in the process.

Imagine such an undertaking. We made a precision-crafted bank vault measuring 27 feet wide, 32 feet long and 12 feet high containing 4,600 safe deposit boxes. Altogether, it weighed more than 350,000 pounds. All work was done to the highest standards of the day. Exacting tolerances. A triple door system with the outer door being fire-resistive and the two inner doors burglar-resistive.

The boast was that it would take safecrackers four weeks to pierce the six inches of steel on the outer door and the nine more inches of steel on the inner doors. The project was so captivating that we invited the public into the factory to witness construction in progress. A running account of the vault’s development appeared in the local Canton, Ohio, press.

When done, it would take a special train of 47 railcars to transport the vault in sections from Canton to the customer on the West Coast. There, a special team of Diebold experts waited to assemble the vault on site.

Work on this enormous project commenced in Canton in August of 1874. Overtime became the rule of the day, with shifts working three-to-four extra hours each night to stay on schedule, all the while handling a significant volume of other work, as well.

By December, the local newspaper was characterizing Diebold, Norris & Co. as “the largest and best safe manufacturer in the world,” turning out a safe an hour.

Although the vault was huge and its price lofty, we didn’t end up with much profit – if any – from the work. That’s because the project was completed on May 7, 1875  -- eight months and 16 days from its onset. The construction contract carried with it a penalty clause that demanded $500-a-day for every day more than six months the vault took to complete. The project was 76 days late, prompting a $38,000 penalty – enough to put quite a hole in a $100,000 contract.

Who was that customer?

Both in our archives and in the public press of the day, the customer for this vault has been variously identified as The U.S. Safe Deposit Company, the San Francisco Safe Deposit Company, the Duncan Safe Deposit Company and even as Wells Fargo. To clear the vagaries of time, we referenced old newspaper clippings from Ohio and New York, Internet searches, archivists and the State Library of California.

It has now been definitively determined that the customer was The Safe Deposit Company of San Francisco, headed by Joseph C. Duncan, city luminary and a prominent West Coast banker. He also owned Pioneer Bank. However, in 1877, three years after the vault was made, both the bank and the safe deposit company failed, creating great local distress. Duncan was charged with a variety of felonies, including grand theft, but never convicted.