Garage Door History
In the early days of automobile production, most people could not afford a car. It was a status symbol, and many early automobile owners bought them simply to show that they could, they were not driven very often. The low number of cars in existence coupled with their low levels of usage made them easy to store. Most large cities were equipped with a few luxury parking houses.
Built on the model of a stable, these houses were heated and employed attendants to retrieve your car. This system worked for a number of years until Henry Ford and his assembly line of Model-T’s appeared. Making cars affordable for more people, they became far more common. The normal mode of storage was no longer possible, since not enough parking houses existed and those who could now afford a car couldn’t necessarily still afford a private garage.
Especially in colder climates it was clear that some protection was necessary for automobiles. Early garages were usually homemade and resembled sheds. They were built apart from the house. Early garage doors were simply large double doors that opened outward. Usually handmade, they didn’t last longer than a year or so and were constantly being repaired and replaced. Another problem was snow and ice. These doors couldn’t be opened without a lot of shoveling, and even then they weren’t necessarily easy to open.
The next innovation in garage door technology was the implementation of sliding doors. Moving outward and allowing the car out, they had to be pulled out by hand. The difficulty this posed was that unless you wanted to re-fit the doors into their tracks every time you opened the garage, it had to be at least twice as wide as the doorway. This proved impractical at times.
Finally, in the early 1930’s the overhead door was developed. Originally the once piece tilting model that still exists today, the sectional version was perfected in the 1950’s. There had been electrical motors implemented in garage doors for years, but it was not until the 1950’s that they were adapted to suburban garages and made affordable for a large number of people.
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