The story
Medeco traces its origins to the Mechanical Development Company, a tool and die shop, founded in mid-1950s by Paul A. Powell, Roy C. Spain and Roy N. Oliver in the Glenvar area of Roanoke County. Roy Oliver served as the CEO of Medeco through the early 1980s.
In the 1960s, Roy Spain perfected a lock featuring angled key cuts with elevating and rotating pin tumblers, and he submitted the design to the U.S. Patent Office. As part of a promotional campaign, he advertised that anyone who could pick this lock would receive $50,000. Only a detective from New York City succeeded; accomplishing the feat a single time but failing on subsequent attempts.
The design ultimately proved to be resistant to the widely used forms of attack of that time. Capitalizing on this invention and related patents, the Medeco company was established in 1968. The name was formed from the constituent words of the "Mechanical Development Company".
The Swedish based lock manufacturer Assa Abloy Group acquired Medeco in 1998.
Medeco currently has over 250 employees, still operating out of facilities in Roanoke County.
From Wikipedia’s article on Medeco, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3