Original photo by qbdp/ Shutterstock
For the first several thousand years of their existence, doors were largely knob-free; they were typically opened and closed using latches, handles, bars, or leather straps. The process of entering and exiting a room was revolutionized on December 10, 1878, when a self-taught 16-year-old inventor named Osbourn Dorsey received a patent for a doorknob with an internal door-latching mechanism. This was a massive improvement to existing doorknobs, which lacked internal latches and were generally more difficult to use — some used external bolts or strings and didn’t stay in place as well. However, as modern innovations can take a while to catch on, it took several more years for most people to embrace Dorsey’s upgraded doorknobs and begin having them installed in their homes.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a fibThey were actually invented in ancient Egypt. The earliest known evidence of doors are depictions found in Egyptian tomb paintings dating back 4,000 years.
Although most of us now use Dorsey’s version of a doorknob every day, little else is known about the African American inventor’s life beyond the fact that his mother Christina and siblings Mary and Levi were enslaved prior to his birth in 1862. Before his inventing days, Dorsey either trained or worked as a blacksmith.
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______ was the Roman god of doorways.
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Janus was the Roman god of doorways.
The battery was invented in 1800.
Though we may think of them as fairly newfangled inventions inextricably linked to our electronic gadgets, batteries as we know them today were actually invented more than 200 years ago, in 1800. The mind behind this innovation was Alessandro Volta, who was born in 1745 and came up with the chemical battery more than half a century later.
Volta had long been interested in conductivity, having written his paper “On the forces of attraction of electric fire” in 1769, and his invention was preceded by several other relevant experiments. His voltaic pile, as it was called at the time, was a stack of some 30 alternating zinc and silver discs separated by cloth soaked in brine. A current flowed when he connected a wire to both ends, and what he initially dubbed an “artificial electric organ” proved to be a massive success.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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