Garage door opener

The garage door opener button is the unsung workhorse of the button world. Outcast to the garage, it often sits alone without any neighbors. No On or Submit or Popcorn to socialize with. It doesn’t even get enough respect to earn its own icon.

That’s why in many ways, the garage door opener is the perfect example of a button.

The brilliance of buttons is that they make something else happen when you poke them, usually something that requires more effort than you can, or want, to exert. Like lifting a garage door, which emphasizes the -mechanical in the “electromechanical button.” Many buttons trigger massive lifting/pushing/moving mechanical power in the industrial world, but the garage door opener is the only common muscle button in the home.

The garage door opener does not have its own icon because it doesn’t need one. Icons are for buttons that need to explain themselves, to announce who they are in a crowded urban sea of many buttons. But the garage door opener button is rural, on its own, no other buttons in sight. It’s a farmhouse, humble in appearance, willing to serve. It’s a lighthouse, often lit to guide you to it in the dark.

By the way, the electric garage door opener was invented by C.G. Johnson in 1926 in Hartford City, Indiana. Five years earlier, he invented the overhead lifting garage door. Previously, all garage doors swung out like barn doors or slid to the side. His company Overhead Door is still going strong.