Who really invented the doorknob?
Haven’t we always had doorknobs? No; they are a surprisingly recent inventionand the story of the doorknob contains other surprises as well. What did people do before there were doorknobs? Quite probably, a lot of things. Like many other historical technologies, the history of how to shut the door and keep it that way is buried in the undocumented lives of everyday people. Most of them were too occupied with the details of daily life to realize that later generations would want documentation of what they had done. We know about door-closing technology from archeological and historical remains and from popular expressions. The Bible contains references to barring doors and gates; people used bars to keep doors shut and secure for centuries. “Katy, bar the door,” a slang expression for ‘expect trouble,’ may date back to the time of James I, King of Scotland, when a lady-in-waiting tried to stave off intruders by barring the door with her arm and earning the name Catherine Barlass. Locks
