How Did Humans Invent Doors?

Explores the history of doors, from Stone Age doorways and rolled reed mats to 5,000-year-old Alpine lake-village doors, pivot mechanics, and Egyptian and Roman door designs.

Key Takeaways

Doors predate Egypt by thousands of years and developed from simple curtains and mats.
The pivot-and-socket principle dominated door design for millennia.
Door design has always had social and symbolic meanings, including power, imprisonment, and religion.
Preserved wetland sites are crucial for understanding early doors because organic materials rarely survive.

What the video covers

Common claim that Egypt invented the door is challenged: the oldest surviving door was found in a Swiss bog, centuries older than the first pharaoh.
Early doorways were covered by hides or woven reed mats, which rarely survive in the archaeological record.
Egyptian stone doorways often carried a rounded drum below the lintel, likely a stone copy of the rolled mat once used as a door.
Çatalhöyük (c. 7000 BC) had no ground-level doors; residents entered through roof holes using ladders.
The Robenhausen door (c. 3700 BC), found in 1868 in a Swiss marsh, was made from a split silver fir with a hinge spur and lashing holes.
A 3063 BC poplar door found at the Zurich Opera House site shows sophisticated plank joinery.
Doors pivot on pegs in sockets; handle placement far from the hinge reduces the force needed to swing the door.
Skara Brae in Orkney used stone slab doors with sliding bars, and House 7 had a bar reachable only from outside.
An Egyptian door socket shaped like a bound prisoner (c. 3000 BC) is a symbol of royal power.
Later sections cover Egyptian false doors, Greek and Roman doors, medieval church doors, Japanese shoji, and the revolving door.

Chapters

Was Egypt really the first to invent the door?

No. The video explains that the oldest surviving door was found in a Swiss bog dating to around 3700 BC, centuries older than the first pharaoh. Egyptians did paint and build fine doors, but they were not the originators.

Why did Çatalhöyük residents use roof entrances?

The houses were packed wall to wall with no streets or ground-level doorways. People walked across the rooftops and climbed down ladders through roof holes, which also released hearth smoke, and this worked for over a thousand years.

Why is the door handle placed on the far edge?

Turning force depends on distance from the pivot. Pushing far from the hinge needs much less force to swing the door than pushing near it, so the handle sits on the far edge.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Shut a door behind you tonight and listen for the click of the latch. In that one small sound, the wind and every stranger on Earth end up on the other side. You walk through dozens of doors a day without noticing. Yet in one of the Stone Age's largest towns, thousands of people

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lived for over a thousand years without a single front door. They came home through the roof. So who first hung a slab of wood in a hole in the wall, and why did it take so long?

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If you find this fascinating, take a second to hit the like button. Look up who invented the door, and the answer you will usually find is Egypt. The earliest recorded doors, the line goes, appear in paintings on the walls of Egyptian tombs, single or double doors,

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each cut from a solid piece of wood. The sentence turns up in encyclopedias, on websites, and on classroom worksheets. It is not exactly wrong. Egyptians did paint doors, and they built some of the finest in the ancient world. But the oldest door anyone has ever held

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in their hands was not painted on a tomb wall. A farmer pulled it out of a Swiss bog in 1868, and it is centuries older than the first pharaoh. Before there were doors, there were doorways, and a doorway is a contradiction. A shelter exists to keep the weather out, and every opening lets

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it back in. Hunter-gatherers who camped in one spot for a few weeks at a time could live with that. A hide hung over the entrance, or a mat of woven reeds, did the job. Those materials rot away within a few years, which is why archaeologists almost never find them.

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Egypt kept a trace of them anyway. The earliest barrier across an Egyptian doorway was a rolled mat, let down to close the opening and tied up under the lintel when it was open. When Egyptian masons of the Old Kingdom carved doorways and false doors in stone, they often included a

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rounded drum just below the lintel. Egyptologists think it is that rolled-up mat, copied in stone long after wooden doors had replaced the real thing. The first door was a curtain, and Egyptian masons kept carving it for centuries. Settling down did not automatically produce a

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door, either. Around 7000 BC, on the Konya plain of Anatolia, several thousand people lived packed together in the mudbrick town of Çatalhöyük. The houses were built wall against wall, with no streets between them and no doorways at ground level. People walked across the rooftops,

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climbed down a ladder through a hole in the roof, and the same hole let the smoke from the hearth escape. The roof was the street. The front door was a ladder. For more than a thousand years, that worked perfectly well. The oldest doors that do survive come from a

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place with a very particular problem: cold wind off the water. From around 5000 BC, farming communities around the lakes of the Alps built villages of wooden houses along the shores, many of them raised on posts above the damp ground. When the lake levels rose,

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those villages sank into waterlogged mud. And mud without oxygen is one of the few places on Earth where wood can last for five thousand years. In the middle of June 1868, a farmer named Jakob Messikommer was digging in the Robenhausen marshes near Lake Pfäffikon, east of Zurich. Messikommer

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was a farmer from Wetzikon who had turned himself into an excavator of the old lake villages, and when he lifted a long, flat board out of the peat, he thought it was the lid of a box, or maybe a bench. It was 1.6 meters tall, 65 centimeters wide, and only a few centimeters

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thick. Its maker had split the outer wood away from the trunk of a large silver fir and pressed it flat. At its lower edge was a projecting spur. Along one side ran a row of holes.

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The spur was the hinge. It sat in a hollow in the sill, and the door swung on it like a top turning on its point. The holes along the edge probably held straps of leather or cord that tied the door to its frame. In 1998, the Swiss National Museum took two small samples

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of the wood for radiocarbon dating at the laboratory of ETH Zurich. The result put the door at around 3700 BC. At that moment, nobody anywhere on Earth was writing anything down.

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In 2010, workers were digging an underground car park beside the Zurich Opera House when the city's archaeologists found the remains of at least five Stone Age villages, built one on top of another, the oldest dating to around 3700 BC. More than eight thousand pieces of wood came out

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of the mud. One of them was a door. It was made of poplar planks, 153 centimeters tall and 88 wide, and the parts it pivoted on were still intact. Its tree rings put its construction in 3063 BC, roughly the era when the first ditch was being dug at Stonehenge. The chief archaeologist,

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Niels Bleicher, was struck by the way the planks had been joined together, and called it "a clever design that even looks good." These were not grand doors. They belonged to farmers who stayed put all year and sat out Alpine winters beside open water. A hide flap

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cannot stop a wind like that. A wooden panel can. Every one of these early doors solved the same mechanical problem. A door is a wall that has to move, and the easiest way to move a heavy panel without lifting it is to make it rotate around one edge. A peg at the bottom, sometimes another at

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the top, sitting in sockets. That is a pivot, and for the next four thousand years almost every door on Earth turned on one. It also explains where the handle goes. The turning force you produce depends on how far from the pivot you push. Push a door at the handle, around 80 centimeters from the hinge,

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and it swings easily. Push it a hand's width from the hinge, and you need roughly ten times the force to move it the same way. Anyone who has shoved the wrong side of a glass door has felt this. Every door handle you have ever touched sits on the far edge for the same

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reason a long wrench loosens a stubborn bolt. At the far end of Europe, people with the same need had no trees to make a door from. Skara Brae, a cluster of stone houses on Orkney, off the northern tip of Scotland, was lived in from about 3180 BC to about 2500 BC. Each

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house was entered through a low doorway closed with a slab of stone. Holes were cut into the stone jambs on either side, and a bar of bone or wood slid across the inside of the slab and into them. In most of the houses, the bar was housed in a small cell just inside the door,

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so the family could bar themselves in against the night. One building, House 7, is different.

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Its bar was housed in a cell that could only be reached from the passage outside. Whoever was inside House 7 could not get out unless someone outside let them. Archaeologists still argue about why. Suggestions include childbirth, rituals around death, initiation, and imprisonment.

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Almost as soon as the door existed, someone worked out that it could keep people in as well as out.

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In Egypt, the pivot became propaganda. In 1898, the archaeologist James Quibell, excavating the temple at Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt, found a door socket carved from sandstone in the shape of a prisoner lying face down with his arms bound. It dates to around 3000 BC,

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near the very beginning of Egypt's first dynasties. The pivot of the temple door sat in a hollow in the prisoner's back. Every time the door opened or closed, it ground into him. The Penn Museum, which holds the socket today, reads it as a statement of the king's

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power over his enemies, repeated every single day. Egyptians knew perfectly well what a hinge was.

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They put small hinges on the lids of boxes. But a wooden door leaf is heavy, and a pivot carries weight far better, so Egyptian door leaves turned on pegs, carved from the leaf itself or fitted into it like giant dowels, that sat in sockets in the threshold below and the lintel above. Because

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those sockets sat behind the door frame, the frame stopped the door from swinging outward. Almost every ordinary Egyptian door opened inward. Good timber was scarce along the Nile, and that made doors valuable. The Palermo Stone, a slab of black basalt recording the

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annals of Egypt's early kings, notes that under the pharaoh Sneferu, around 2600 BC, forty ships arrived carrying what was probably cedar from the Levant, along the coast of what is now Lebanon. Egyptian doors were often fitted or plated with copper, electrum, or gold. That is

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exactly why so few survive. They were too valuable to leave behind, so they were stripped and reused.

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One door that did survive came from the tomb of Sennedjem, a craftsman who lived in Deir el-Medina, the village of the workers who cut and decorated the royal tombs of the New Kingdom, in the thirteenth century BC. Local villagers found his tomb in 1886. Its wooden door,

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made of sycamore fig boards joined with dowels, is painted on both sides. The outside shows Sennedjem and his family standing before the gods of the dead. The inside faced the burial chamber, where no living person was ever meant to see it. It shows Sennedjem and his wife, sitting together,

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playing a board game called senet. Egyptian religion was full of doors. Tombs held false doors, carved stone panels shaped like doorways that led nowhere, set in the wall of the offering chapel. The ka, part of a person's spirit, was believed to pass back and

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forth through them to take the food and drink the living left outside. And in the Book of the Dead, when the soul reaches the Hall of Judgment, the door itself stands in the way. The doorposts, the bolt, and the threshold each refuse to let the soul pass until it can tell

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them their secret names. In the Egyptian afterlife, even the door asked for a password.

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Mesopotamia had even less timber than Egypt. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, there were reeds, mud, and date palms, but almost no tall, straight trees.

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Wood for a great door had to be hauled from distant mountains, and the most prized of all was cedar. A temple door in Sumer was a trophy. A Mesopotamian door hung from a heavy upright post, and the foot of that post turned in a cup carved into a block of stone set into the ground.

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Kings had their names carved onto those blocks. Gudea, who ruled the city-state of Lagash in the twenty-second century BC, left door sockets inscribed with dedications to the gods whose temples he rebuilt. One of them, from the city of Girsu, dedicated to the god Ningirsu, is now in

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the British Museum. Once the door was installed, nobody walking through it would ever read those words. They were a message for the gods, and for whichever king rebuilt the temple next.

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One of the oldest stories in the world has a door at its heart. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu travel to the Cedar Forest, kill its guardian Humbaba, and cut down the tallest cedar of all. Enkidu turns it into an enormous door, and they float

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it down the Euphrates as a gift for the temple of the god Enlil in the holy city of Nippur. Then the gods decide that Enkidu must die for what the two friends have done. Lying on his deathbed, in the seventh tablet of the epic, Enkidu does not rage at the gods. He rages at the

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door. He speaks to it as if it could hear him and tells it that, had he known how this would end, he would have hacked it apart and made it into a raft. More than three thousand years ago,

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a poet imagined a dying man blaming a door. The Assyrian kings turned the door into a billboard. Around 850 BC, Shalmaneser III hung a pair of enormous gates, probably of cedar, at the town of Imgur-Enlil, now called Balawat, in northern Iraq. They stood more than six meters

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tall, and they did not hang on hinges. Each leaf was fixed to a massive upright post that turned in a socket, and wrapped around the doors were horizontal bands of hammered bronze, embossed with scenes from the king's campaigns: armies on the march, besieged cities, and tribute arriving from

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the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Sidon. In 1878, Hormuzd Rassam, excavating for the British Museum, recovered the bronze bands. The wood had long since rotted, but the metal still held the outline of the doors. A second set of gates from the same town, made for Shalmaneser's father,

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Ashurnasirpal II, and excavated by Max Mallowan in 1956, ended up in the Mosul Museum. It was badly damaged when the museum was looted in 2003, and again when ISIS occupied it.

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In the Greek world, a door was something you unlocked. In Homer's Odyssey, composed around the eighth century BC, Penelope climbs to her chamber, takes a curved bronze key with an ivory handle, and goes with her maids to the storeroom at the far end of the house where her husband's

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treasures are kept. She unties the strap from the door handle, pushes the key in, and drives back the bolts on the other side. As the doors swing open, Homer says, they groan like a bull bellowing in a meadow. That was the sound of wood grinding in its sockets.

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Greek doors did not glide. They complained. About eight centuries later, in Alexandria, an engineer named Heron worked out how to open a door with fire. In his book Pneumatica, written in the first century AD, he described a small temple whose doors swung open by themselves

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when someone lit a fire on the altar in front of it. Under the altar sat a sealed vessel of air. As the fire heated it, the air expanded and pushed water through a siphon into a hanging bucket.

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The bucket grew heavier and sank, pulling on ropes wound around the door pivots, and the doors turned open. When the fire went out, the air cooled and contracted, sucked the water back out of the bucket, and a counterweight swung the doors shut again. Heron even described a version that

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blew a trumpet as the doors opened. To the people watching, it would have looked as if the god had answered. No trace of the machine has ever been dug up. It survives only on the page, but it is

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the earliest automatic door anyone has described. The Romans gave the door its own god. Janus, with two faces, one looking out and one looking in, presided over doorways and beginnings. The Latin word for a door was ianua. A doorkeeper was an ianitor, which became the English word

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janitor. And the month that opens the year, Ianuarius, named for Janus, became January. The poet Ovid explained that the month of Janus comes first because the door comes first.

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Then the Romans divided the door among even more gods. Forculus looked after the door leaves, from fores, a word for doors. Limentinus watched over the threshold, the limen. And Cardea ruled the hinge, the cardo, the pivot on which the door turned. In the early fifth century, Saint

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Augustine found this ridiculous. A man, he pointed out, can guard his house with a single doorkeeper, yet the Roman gods apparently needed three. The gods faded. The hinge did not. Because a door depends entirely on its cardo, the Romans used the word for

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anything on which everything else depends, and from it came the English word cardinal, meaning principal, the point on which things turn. The threshold carried its own dangers. A Roman bride did not step over the threshold of her new home. Her escorts lifted her and

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carried her across. Around 100 AD, the Greek writer Plutarch tried to explain why. Perhaps, he suggested, it recalled the legend that the first Romans had carried the Sabine women into their houses by force. Or perhaps it was meant to make the bride appear to enter unwillingly.

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Whatever its origin, the custom outlived the Roman Empire by more than fifteen centuries. Some Roman doors still work. In the Roman Forum stands a round building known as the Temple of Romulus, thought to have been built by the emperor Maxentius in the early

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fourth century AD and dedicated to his young son Romulus, who died in 309. Its doors are bronze, among the very few ancient Roman bronze doors still standing, and according to Rome's tourism authority, the original lock still works. The building survived because, in the Middle Ages,

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it became the entrance hall of a church. At Pompeii, the wooden doors vanished in 79 AD, and their absence is what survived. Volcanic ash hardened around the doors of houses and shops, and when the wood decayed, it left door-shaped hollows in the rock. Before the famous plaster

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casts of Pompeii's victims, there were casts of its doors. In 1861, the first object illustrated in the excavation journal of Giuseppe Fiorelli, the director of the excavations, was a plaster cast of a door from a dyer's shop. Fiorelli's team did not cast its first

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human victims until 1863. Pompeii's doors were brought back in plaster before its people were.

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In the Hauran, the volcanic plateau of southern Syria and northern Jordan, timber was so scarce that people made their doors out of stone. The British Museum holds a door of black basalt from the region, carved in the second or third century AD, probably for a tomb. The mason shaped it to

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look exactly like a wooden door, complete with rows of carved nail heads that hold nothing together. In a land without trees, people still wanted their stone doors to look like wood.

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In Rome, the church of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill still uses a pair of cypress doors carved around 430 AD, covered in panels of biblical scenes.

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Eighteen of the original twenty-eight panels survive. One of them shows Jesus between the two thieves. It is one of the earliest public images of the crucifixion that survives anywhere, and the artist left out the crosses. Christians at the time were still uneasy about showing them.

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The word door is older than any of these doors. Linguists trace it back to a reconstructed ancestral root, dhwer, which also gave rise to the Old English duru, the Greek thura, and the Latin fores and foris. Curiously, the root often appears in the plural,

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or in a special grammatical form used for pairs, which has led some scholars to wonder whether the earliest speakers of that ancestral language lived in houses with doors made of two swinging halves.

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In Latin, foris meant out of doors, outside. From it came the Late Latin foranus, and eventually the English word foreign. A foreigner, originally, was simply someone from the other side of the door.

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In northern Europe, the door became a slab of oak held together by iron. The oldest door in Britain to be scientifically dated stands in a passage leading to the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey in London. It is made of five vertical oak planks, held together by three horizontal battens and iron

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straps. In 2005, the dendrochronologists Daniel Miles and Martin Bridge matched its tree rings and found that the planks came from a single oak that grew in eastern England, probably in woodland the abbey owned, possibly in Essex. That tree's rings run from 924 to 1030. It was cut down

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sometime after 1032, and the door was most likely made in the 1050s, while Edward the Confessor was building his abbey. Two centuries later, when Henry III rebuilt the abbey, his builders kept the old door and cut it down to fit a new doorway. It once stood about 2.7 meters tall, probably with

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a rounded top. Today it is about two meters tall. In the village of Hadstock in Essex, the north door of St Botolph's church may be just as old, and it has never stopped being used.

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Tree-ring samples taken in 2003 showed that its oak was felled between 1034 and 1042.

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It is almost certainly the oldest door in Britain still doing its original job. Both doors came with a horror story. On April 10, 1661, the diarist Samuel Pepys visited Rochester Cathedral, and local people told him its great doors were covered in the skins of Danes. Versions

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of the story appear at church after church in England. A Viking raider tries to rob the church, gets caught, is flayed alive, and has his skin nailed to the door as a warning to others.

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At Hadstock, a scrap of what looked like leather was found under the door's ironwork in 1791, and repairs in the late nineteenth century turned up a much larger fragment under the metal bands.

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In the 1970s, Ron Reed, a leather specialist at the University of Leeds, examined it and concluded that it was human, probably from someone with fair or greying hair. At Westminster, the story was that someone caught robbing the church had been flayed and his skin nailed to the door.

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In 2022, Ruairidh Macleod, a doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, tested the skins using a method that does them no damage. He rubbed an ordinary eraser across their surface and collected the crumbs. Proteins from the skin stick to the eraser, and a technique

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called ZooMS can identify an animal from the chemical fingerprint of its collagen. The skins from Hadstock and Westminster came from cattle. A skin from the church at Copford, also in Essex, came from a horse or a donkey. None of them were human. The Westminster door was probably

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covered in cowhide on both faces simply to give it a smooth surface for decoration.

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The Viking nailed to the church door was a cow. Those iron straps were also how the door finally escaped the pivot. Medieval doors in northern Europe usually hung on strap hinges, long bands of iron nailed across the planks, each ending in a loop that dropped over a pintle, a simple L-shaped

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iron spike driven into the door frame. The straps held the planks together and carried the weight at the same time. The door no longer needed a socket in the floor. You could lift it straight off its pintles. Blacksmiths shaped the ends into spearheads, scrolls, hearts, and fleurs-de-lis,

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and church doors became showcases for ironwork. Over the following centuries, the hinge shrank. H-shaped and T-shaped hinges spread through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and eventually came the small butt hinge that hides in the gap between the door and its frame. It

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is almost certainly what your own doors hang on. The grandest doors in medieval Europe were cast.

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Around 1015, Bernward, the bishop of Hildesheim in Germany, had a pair of bronze doors made for his church. Each leaf was cast in a single piece using the lost-wax method, each about 4.7 meters tall and weighing around 1.85 tonnes. One leaf tells the story of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to

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Cain killing his brother Abel. The other tells the life of Christ. Four centuries later, in Florence, the goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti spent twenty-seven years on a set of gilded bronze doors for the city's baptistery, finished in 1452. According to the painter and biographer Giorgio

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Vasari, Michelangelo looked at them and declared them worthy to be the gates of Paradise. The name stuck. The originals now sit in a museum, out of the weather, and copies hang in their place.

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In China, doors needed guardians of a different kind. In the first century AD, the philosopher Wang Chong recorded an old belief about two brothers, Shenshu and Yulü, who stood at a gate among the branches of a gigantic peach tree, where the spirits of the dead passed through. Any

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spirit that had done evil, they bound with ropes of reed and fed to tigers. So people hung peach wood figures of the two gods on their doors, and later simply painted their portraits on boards of peach wood. Under the Tang dynasty, the job passed to two real generals. According to the legend,

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the emperor Taizong was tormented by nightmares until two of his commanders, Qin Shubao and Yuchi Gong, stood guard outside his door all night. The nightmares stopped. To let the men sleep, the emperor had their portraits painted on the palace doors instead, and their faces

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still go up on doors across China every New Year. Chinese gates also carried rows of large, rounded studs, which grew from the heads of the nails that held the planks together into a system of rank. On the main gates of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the studs run nine across and nine down,

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eighty-one in all. Nine was the highest single odd number, and it belonged to the emperor.

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Princes and nobles were allowed fewer rows, and ordinary people could not put metal studs on their doors at all. One gate, the Donghua Gate on the eastern side, has seventy-two instead of eighty-one, and nobody agrees why. Japan took the door off its pivot entirely. By

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the eighth century AD, the homes of Japanese nobles were using sliding panels called shoji, and as Japanese paper, washi, became thinner and finer, it was stretched across wooden lattices to make sliding doors that let soft light in while blocking the view. Heavier, opaque panels,

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covered in layers of paper and cloth and often painted, came to be called fusuma. A sliding door needs no room to swing, and the panels could be lifted out entirely, so a single large hall could become two rooms, or four, or one again, depending on the occasion. In a Japanese house, the door was

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not a hole in the wall. The door was the wall. In the Indus Valley, doors were built around privacy. At Mohenjo-daro, in what is now Pakistan, a city that flourished around 2500 BC, many houses were entered from narrow side lanes rather than from the main streets. The ground-floor walls had

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no windows, and the entrances were arranged so that someone passing by could not see straight into the courtyard. Nearly four thousand years later, in Rajasthan, doors had to stop elephants.

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At Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, founded in 1459, iron spikes stud the gates, and the approach turns sharply just before them, so a war elephant could never build up speed for a charge.

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In the canyons of what is now New Mexico, the Ancestral Puebloans who built the great houses of Chaco Canyon, between roughly 850 and 1150 AD, gave many of their doorways a distinctive T shape, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. The shape turns up at other sites across the region.

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What it was for, nobody has proven. Archaeologists are still debating whether it served a practical purpose or was simply the local style. For most of history, the main question about a door was how to keep people out. In the nineteenth century,

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as cities filled with theaters and music halls packed with crowds, the question turned around.

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On June 16, 1883, a travelling entertainer named Alexander Fay put on a show for children at the Victoria Hall in Sunderland, in northeast England. At the end, the performers began handing out toys from the stage, and children holding numbered tickets had been promised prizes on their way

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out. Around 1,100 children in the upstairs gallery rushed for the staircase so they would not miss out. At the bottom of the stairs was a door that opened inward. Someone had bolted it so that it stood open just wide enough for one child at a time, probably to make it easier to

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check tickets. The bolt was on the children's side. The adults on the other side could not reach it. As more and more children poured down the stairs, the ones at the front were crushed against the door. One hundred and eighty-three children, aged between three and fourteen, died.

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Nobody was prosecuted, and the person who bolted the door was never identified. But the inquiry led to laws requiring places of public entertainment to have a minimum number of exits that opened outward. A young inventor in Edinburgh named Robert Alexander

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Briggs then set out to design a bolt that would release instantly when pushed from inside while staying secure from outside. His panic bolt was patented on August 13, 1892, and the first building fitted with it was the Empire Palace Theatre in Edinburgh, which opened that November.

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Twenty years after Sunderland, Chicago learned the same lesson at a far greater cost. On December 30, 1903, during a packed holiday matinee of a musical called Mr. Bluebeard at the Iroquois Theatre, which had opened only weeks earlier, a stage light set a muslin curtain on fire. The comedian Eddie

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Foy stayed on stage in costume, pleading with the audience to stay calm as burning scenery fell around him. But some of the exit doors opened inward. Others were hidden behind heavy drapes.

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Many were fastened with an unfamiliar European latch that most of the audience had never seen.

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As the crowd pressed forward, those doors would not open. One stage door jammed until a railroad agent passing outside took it off its hinges. About 602 people died.

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In Indianapolis, a hardware manager named Carl Prinzler, who by one account had planned to see a show at the Iroquois himself, could not stop thinking about those doors. With his neighbor Henry DuPont, an architectural engineer, he designed a bar that ran across the width of a

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door at waist height and released the latch the moment anyone pushed against it. They received their first patents in 1908 and named the device by combining their own names with that of the company that made it, Vonnegut Hardware, the family business of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut's

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ancestors. Vonnegut, DuPont, Prinzler. Von Duprin. It went on sale in 1910. The next year, when fire broke out at an Indianapolis school, every student got out in forty-five seconds.

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Outward-opening exits with push bars are now required in crowded public buildings, and that is why the front door of your house probably swings inward while the door of a cinema swings out. At home, an inward-opening door keeps the hinge pins on the inside, where a burglar

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cannot knock them out and lift the door away. In a crowd, the only door that saves lives is one that opens in the direction people are running. Cities also created a problem with air. In 1881, a German inventor named H. Bockhacker patented what he called a door without a draft. Seven years

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later, on August 7, 1888, Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia received US patent 387,571 for what he called a storm-door structure, a set of wings fixed to a central post and turning inside a round enclosure. A revolving door always has a wing sealing the gap, so there is never an

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open path between inside and outside. It kept out wind, rain, snow, and street noise. The first one went into Rector's, a fashionable restaurant on Broadway in New York, in 1899, in the square that would soon be renamed Times Square. In tall buildings, it solves a stranger problem,

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too. In winter, warm air rises through elevator shafts and stairwells and leaks out near the top of the building, which pulls cold air in at the bottom. Engineers call it the stack effect, and in a skyscraper it can make an ordinary ground-floor door whistle, or fight back when

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you try to open it. A revolving door never gives that pressure an opening. In 2006, students at MIT measured the difference on their own campus and found that a revolving door lets through about one-eighth as much air as a swinging door. They also found that only around a quarter of people

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actually used the revolving doors. Everyone else took the swinging doors next to them. Those swinging doors are there because of another fire. On November 28, 1942, flames tore through the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston. Its main entrance was a single

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revolving door. As the crowd pressed into it, the door seized, and firefighters later had to take apart its frame to free the bodies piled up behind it. Other doors opened inward, and some exits had been locked or sealed. Four hundred and ninety-two people died, in the deadliest

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nightclub fire in history. Today, building codes generally require revolving doors to collapse flat when people push hard against them, and to have ordinary hinged doors right beside them.

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The last great change came from the wind. In the 1950s, Dee Horton and Lew Hewitt were working in the glass storefront business in Corpus Christi, Texas, a city where strong winds made swinging glass doors hard to open, and the two men spent much of their time repairing broken ones. Around

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1954, they built a sliding door that opened by itself when someone stepped onto a mat in front of it. Because it slid sideways instead of swinging, the wind could not catch it.

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They began selling their automatic doors in 1960, and the first one went into a building in Corpus Christi. Nineteen centuries after Heron opened temple doors with fire, a door finally opened by itself for anyone who walked up to it. So, how did humans invent the door?

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Not in a single moment, and not in a single place. The doorway came first, as old as shelter itself, and for most of prehistory it was closed with nothing sturdier than a hide or a reed mat, if it was closed at all. The door, a rigid panel that swings, appeared once people settled permanently,

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built houses meant to last for years, and had warmth and stored food worth shutting in. Some settled towns, like Çatalhöyük, did without one entirely. The oldest doors yet found, from the lake villages around Zurich, date to around 3700 BC and 3063 BC, and they already used the solution

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that would dominate for the next four thousand years: a pivot, a peg turning in a socket.

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From there, the door changed as the things people feared changed. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, where good timber was precious, the door became a treasure and a symbol of royal power. In Greece and Rome, it acquired keys and gods of its own. In medieval Europe, iron strap hinges lifted it off

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the socket in the floor. In Japan, it slid instead of swinging and became the wall itself. Then, in the last century and a half, disasters taught builders that a door must open the way people run, and crowded cities taught them to stop the wind with doors that revolve and doors that slide.

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The door was invented when humans stopped moving. A camp needs an opening. A home needs a door. Every door since, from a split slab of silver fir in a Swiss marsh to the sliding glass at the supermarket, has done the same job: to be a wall when you want a wall,

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and an opening when you want to pass through. But a door only keeps anyone out if it can be fastened, and the bolt Penelope drew back with her bronze key was just the beginning. The story of how humans learned to lock a door, from simple wooden bars to a London lock that sat in a shop

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window for more than sixty years daring anyone to pick it, is even stranger, and that video is on your screen right now. Go watch it. I'll meet you there. And if you're not heading there next, hit subscribe and drop a comment letting me know what topic or mystery I should explore next.

Topics:history of doorsStone AgeRobenhausen doorÇatalhöyükEgyptian architecturepivot hingesarchaeologySkara Braeancient engineeringrevolving door

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