The Beautiful Life of Inanimate Objects: Doorknobs

Reading back through some old blog posts, I found a short rant about umbrellas and their simple perfection in a travelogue, and today I've been thinking upon another everyday object whose place is often disregarded in our everyday lives:  Doorknobs.

"Doorknobs?" I hear you saying as I lie awake at night, sweating and staring into space. "Doorknobs?  Who cares about doorknobs?"

Apparently, no one.  I started doing some research and discovered that, throughout history, most people were far more concerned with keeping the portals to their homes shut than with documenting how they did it. There have been many forms of keeping-door-closed technology throughout the ages, from the simple but classic "heavy piece of wood" to the elegant "piece of string through a hole."  There are references in classic works such as the Bible to "barring doors"  and this seems to have been good enough for the human collective for centuries.

If I were Grendel, I would have trashed this place too.

In the Middle Ages, most people's home consisted of one giant room, lovingly described by modern historians as "a filthy, stinking hovel" and by modern urbanites as "a cheap studio apartment." Look at a Viking hall, for example. It was initially just a giant rectangular room that was used as a permanent residence for the king and all his retainers. People basically just slept on the floor of the place after feasting and drinking. No doorknobs needed! When rooms were added to early structures, people just kind of hung a dead animal's skin up for privacy, or maybe a nice woven blanket. Later, wooden doors came into vogue, complete with hand-tooled strap hinges, which might include a wooden bar with a little leather latch, but proper doorknobs? Not in the slightest. So, when did doorknobs replace "random bit of material" and "giant block of wood" as our preferred egress and entrance enabler? When was this revolution?

Right after the American Revolution, actually.

Freedom.

See, you right remember that America used to be a British colony, and at that time, England discouraged or outright banned the colonies from manufacturing their own goods. The colonies were expected to send raw resources, like wood and iron, back to England, and get their manufactured goods from skilled English craftsman. The English Government even banned English craftsmen from crossing the pond. Ships manifests and newspaper advertisements of the time depicted that all door-related hardware (hinges, locks, etc) was coming to the colonies from England. But not doorknobs per se, mostly just latches and such.

It wasn't until 1815, three decades after the Revolutionary War, that America began to develop the internal manufacturing processes that allowed it to begin to shed the economic and cultural ties to England. Taking a cue from England, the US Government placed big tariffs on imported goods, encouraging domestic purchases and sparking a way of invention called The Industrial Revolution. Patents flourished.

So, who invented the doorknob? It's kind of hard to say, as the U.S Patent Office burned to the ground in December of 1836, destroying pretty much every patent from 1790 to 1836 in the process. Cotton gin, Lightning rod, and steamboat patents lost to the ravages of time.

GET THIS PERSON A PATENT

Therefore, The first documented invention of a doorknob was a patent issued to one Osbourn Dorsey in 1878, which is a lot of centuries of people just settling for door handles (I'm not even going to start on Europeans and their dirty, socialist door levers). Now, Dorsey probably didn't invent the doorknob in the strictest sense;  Doorknobs of a similar design seem to have existed for about a century or so previously. However, Osbourn was the first person to get a patent for them, and if we've learned anything from the epic Edison vs Tesla conflict, patents are all that really matters to the history books. Osbourn Dorsey was also credited with the patent for the door stop, but I think it's safe to assume people had been putting rocks, bricks, and pets in front of their doors to keep them open for some time previously.


Here's where the simple beauty of the doorknob emerges.

A doorknob is really little more than a bolt connected to a cylinder, that when turned, pulls the bolt out of a hole in the doorframe. A spring or some such contrivance pushes the bolt back into place when the doorknob isn't being turned. PRESTO. Slap a couple of plates on that baby, and you've got a doorknob. Technically, the plates are known as "Escutcheon plates," and are classified as "door furniture" by Wikipedia, which might be the loneliest page on all of Wikipedia. There's something strangely magical about the idea that doorknobs exist practically alongside the United States through history, and that such a simple, Industrial age object has remained basically unchanged for so long.

Someone, somewhere, is aroused by this.

Sure, doorknobs are a terrible disease transmission point, and they aren't remotely as easy to use as leftist, socialist "door levers."

Honestly, I don't know how to feel about switching over en masse to door levers, as I've seen a cat use those to open the door, and I'm pretty sure our species won't survive if the cats can't be kept out. Also, didn't they have door levers in Jurassic Park? Just saying.

So there you have it, a brief history of doorknobs, perhaps one of the most overlooked objects in our daily lives. Doorknobs: Sign of civilization, sign of progress, sign of industry.

Locks are another topic all together.