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Wednesday 29 October 2014

Door

The ancient Greeks developed several ways of allowing a door to be unlocked from the outside as well as from the inside. One improvement consisted of a rope attached to a pivoted bar and passed through a hole in the door. A tug on the rope lifted the bar from its cleats.

The great door to Chepstow Castle in Monmouthshire, Wales is the oldest castle door in Europe, dating from the 1190s. Made with latticed wood and backed by iron plates, it's withstood centuries of sieges, never once giving way. 

Louis XIV of France had many bizarre rules in place at the palace of Versailles. One of these rules was that no person could knock on his door, instead they had to scratch the door with their left pinky finger. This lead to a large amount of nobles to grow out their left pinky nail.


The saying “when one door closes, another opens" is an Alexander Graham Bell quote which he then followed by saying "but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

The world’s first revolving door was the Van Kannel Revolving Storm Door, patented on August 7, 1888 by Theophilus van Kannel of Philadelphia. Van Kannel came up with idea for revolving doors because he hated opening doors for women. The patent drawing by Theophilus Van Kannel below was for a "Storm-Door Structure."

Theophilus Van Kannel's patent drawing for a revolving door, 1888

The push bar style exit doors commonly seen in businesses and schools is called a "crash bar". This was designed to prevent human deaths during stampedes and "crushes" after the Victoria Hall disaster in Sunderland, England in 1883 when 183 children died because a door had been bolted at the bottom of a stairwell.

A total of 60 doors were destroyed by Jack Nicholson for his iconic "Here's Johnny!" scene in The Shining.

When the studio behind Star Trek received a letter from a builder asking how to make automatic sliding doors that opened and closed as fast as on the Enterprise, the reply explained that the doors were manually operated by an offstage crewman. If too late, cast would hit unopened doors.

The Foley sound effect for automatic doors in Star Wars was created by sliding a piece of paper out of an envelope.

Every door frame in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace had to be taken down and rebuilt when they proved to be too low for 6’4 tall Liam Neeson. It cost the set-crew an extra $150,000.

The Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre is home to the four largest doors (each bay door is 139 meters/456 feet high, taller than the Statue of Liberty ) in the world; the doors take 45 minutes to open.

Cellar door has been cited as the most beautiful phrase in the English language based purely in terms of its sound.


Vancouver banned doorknobs, even in private homes, in favor of levers, which are easier for the elderly and disabled to maneuver.

A "poor door" is a separate entrance in a multi-unit housing development for those living in less expensive apartments, so that wealthier tenants don't need to encounter or see them.

Using horizontal push bars instead of regular door knobs/handles is too prevent a crowd from smashing into a door and preventing its ability to open. It's called panic hardware.

Poorly designed doors (doors that aren't obvious if you push, pull, turn a handle, etc to open) are called "Norman Doors" and are named after Don Norman who writes about how it should be obvious as to how everyday items function.

Motor vehicle makers employ sound engineers to give car doors that satisfying 'thunk' when closed.

Source Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

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