When you use a search engine to find “locksmiths near me,” you’re taking part in a grand tradition without even being aware of it.
“Smith” is an ancient word. It’s been part of the English language since its very beginning, and it finds its ultimate roots in the Proto-Indo-European language, an early language spoken up to five and a half thousand years ago from which most European languages descent. The Proto-Indo-European root *smi- meant “to cut” or “to work with a sharp instrument.” In many languages descended from Proto-Indo-European, it came to take on the meaning of “skilled worker,” and in English, it has long referred to a skilled craftsman who works with metal of some kind. The word “locksmith” isn’t as ancient, but it’s still far from being a young word. The earliest records of the word “locksmith” come from the early thirteenth century, during the Middle English period. Over a hundred years before the birth of Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English literature, an English villager or shop owner in need of better security might ask a neighbor if he knew of a “loksmith nere me”–a “locksmith near me.”
Indeed, the word “smith” was an incredibly useful one. For every type of metal that could be worked with, there was a smith who specialized in it–you could go see a goldsmith, a tinsmith, a coppersmith, a blacksmith, a whitesmith, a bronzesmith, a platinumsmith, a pewtersmith, and more. In addition, different craftsmen who specialized in making specific things from metal also got the title “smith”: these included arrowsmiths, swordsmiths, bladesmiths, gunsmiths, weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, silversmiths, and, of course, locksmiths. When you consider that occupations often became family names, it’s no surprise that “Smith” is the most common surname in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
But, despite the enormous popularity of the name and the usefulness of the title, smiths are hard to come by these days. Some smiths, like armorsmiths and arrowsmiths, became obsolete once their wares were no longer needed for warfare; for many more, this obsolescence came when affordable means of mass production became common, making it cheaper and easier to make metal objects in factories rather than individually with a smith’s tools. If you were to search online for a “blacksmith near me,” you might find a living history museum, a renaissance fair, or perhaps a small group of artisans dedicated to keeping the craft alive. It’s an astonishing change, considering the absolute necessity of blacksmiths in times past.
There is a type of smith, however, that has survived into the modern era, and is still essential–the locksmith. If you were to search online for a “locksmith near me,” you’d find more than just a dedicated remnant of an industry that’s a mere vestige of its former glory. Instead, you’d find a thriving variety of businesses filled with people skilled in opening, repairing and installing locks and safes, making single keys and master key arrays and even more modern security options like access card systems and security cameras. Such an online search may even have led you right here to us. You no longer go to a blacksmith if you need nails, and you no longer go to a coppersmith when you need new plumbing, but you still go to a locksmith when you have a need work done that involves locks or related security hardware. So when you search for locksmiths near you–whether you’re here in Phoenixville or nearby in places like King of Prussia, Downingtown, Charlestown, Collegeville, Chester Springs, Paoli, West Chester, Exton, Pottstown, or Malvern–and find us, Advanced Lock and Security, you’re partaking in an eight-hundred-year-old tradition that’s still going strong.
