On April 22, 1924, U.S. Patent No. 1,490,987 issued to Harry E. Soref on a lock casing:

Soref’s innovation was making the lock body from a plurality of steel laminations secured together with rivets — a construction still widely used 102 years later.

Soref was born in 1887 Bilozirka, Ukraine, and emigrated to the U.S. where he worked as a lock smith. When he was unable to find a taker for his lock design, he co-founded the Master Lock company with two friends — Samuel Stahl and Phillip E. Yolles, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to build his locks. Mr. Soref held more than eighty patents for locks and lock-making machinery.

He died in 1957 in Phoenix, Arizona, aged 70.