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I wish there had been a link or reference to a more in-depth history, since this article is quite short and skips over any early stuff. I've been weirdly interested in door knobs and handles ever since I moved into an older (110 years) house and tried to find a matching door knob for one that was weirdly missing (got lucky due to its distinctive fleur-de-lis motif and knowing their age).

Tangentially, this reminded me of a nice automotive door handle taxonomy I came across recently: https://jalopnik.com/this-is-the-definitive-classification-g...

Yeah, it also completely misses the influence of the ADA on door handles in the US, and the complete migration away from non-lever handles in non-residential spaces.
I often use doors as the introduction to understand affordances. It's crazy that we've had doors for 5000 years and we still make them hard to open.

See "Norman Doors": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI

The Design of Everyday Things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

What time do they specifically describe the Norman Door? I skipped around in the video and I got the general point (doors, like everything else, should make invalid options not look valid), but I couldn't stand the video's style enough to sit through the whole thing.
All the confusing doors they show are "Norman Doors":

> A so-called “Norman Door” has design elements that give you the wrong usability signals to the point that special signage is needed to clarify how they work. Without signs, a user is left guessing about whether to push or pull, creating needless frustration.

(from the 99% Invisible page)

Here's an interesting subtlety of modern door handles. Next time you're in a high-rise building, check the door handles on the stairwells. You may find that the movement of the handle on one side of the door is mechanically uncorrelated with the movement of the door handle on the other side; yet other, identical-looking door handles in the same building may function normally.

I believe this is a safety feature to prevent doors from being jammed on the opposite side by putting e.g. a piece of furniture underneath the door handle. Someone had to actually think of this risk, and invent this special type of door handle - yet most people will never notice it.

I heard someone refer to doors as "a building's handshake" or a building's first impression. The REI near me uses canoe paddles for door handles which is brilliant.
The one by me has ice axes for handles. It's so cool.
Maybe this article never loaded correctly, but it really seemed to be lacking in images. It's spends a paragraph talking about a handle made by Walter Gropius but never bothers to show it to you.

I satisfied my curiosity here: https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/products/my-favourite-...

The handle designed by Walter Gropius is the first image of the article for me, even before the introduction. Direct link: https://apollo.imgix.net/content/uploads/2020/06/GettyImages...
I see it now! I just didn't scroll back up to the top of the page to find the image of something being discussed in the middle of the article