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The Hydraulic Door Check
By RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER

The hydraulic door check was invented by ... in the year .... This invention belongs to the large family of labor-saving devices which we think of as typically American. Before entering into a discussion of the door check I would like to make some observations on the door, which preceded the door check is predicated. The most striking property of doors (although not unique to doors) is RESONANCE between two states, which can be conveniently labeled as 'open' and 'closed.' Resonance is never a simple, unqualified fluctuation between two states; even so in this case. A door——at any given moment——is in a state of being closed. This is not a speculative model for a door but a description of the state of affairs which immediately existed when the first door was brought into being.

When an electric buzzer is engaged, the clapper strikes the bell, drawn to it by the interaction of a magnetic field and a current running through the clapper. The motion of the clapper opens the circuit (stops the current) and the clapper is no longer drawn to the bell. In fact it is drawn away from the bell by a spring, constantly engaged, but too weak to resist the pull of the magnet when the current is flowing. Both the actions of the spring and of the current are colored by uncertainty so the resonance pattern must be described as: clapper to bell, with strong likelihood of its drawing away, and clapper away from the bell, with strong likelihood of its returning to strike the bell.

To use a now outdated model for the C6H6 aromatic ring, the alpha-configuration of alternating single and double bond carries with it the strong likelihood of a shift to the beta-configuration, and back again.

The properties of 'open' and 'closed' cannot be divorced from the 'geography' of the door, i.e., without reference to that which the door opens or closes. It becomes obvious that to speak of a door as being 'open' or 'closed' is in fact a contradiction in terms. Can this be remedied by saying that the door when closed is 'in the act' of closing itself? God forbid! Or in the act of closing that to which it is appended? Not quite. The act is not the transformation. the act takes place in time or, more correctly, takes place in stages. Otherwise it is not an act. At any rate there is no such thing (in our terms of reference) as somewhat open, or somewhat closed. In other words the tiniest crack is open, and closed is closed. Try it this way: open position is location-of-a-door different from closed position. Let us say the door is just barely open. Still we can take that offset, split it in half, get a little bit closer to closed and still not be closed. This can be carried on indefinitely, so one has to say that one cannot define a minimal open position which is different from closed position.

Having effectively closed the door we may now direct our attention to the partition to which the door is appended.

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Detail from an Italian Landscape by Thomas Cole.

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