The panic bar was invented by Robert Alexander Briggs in 1892. But that’s not the whole story. He was motivated by a tragic disaster in England in 1883. The panic bar did not make its way into the United States until there were similar disasters on US soil. Discover the history of this essential door hardware and gain new respect for how it keeps your property safe in the article below.

The Tragic History of the Panic Bar

The need for some kind of additional door safety mechanism was made clear by the Victoria Hall disaster. In Sunderland, England, in 1883, children in the Victoria Hall were enjoying a children’s variety show. At the end, the hosts announced that some children would receive a free toy. There were more than a thousand children in the audience, and most rushed down the stairs to the exit in the hope of getting a toy. However, the door at the end of the staircase was bolted shut. The children at the front got stuck. The children at the back—with no knowledge of the conditions of the children at the front— kept moving forward and crushed 183 of the children at the front to death.

Adults realized what was happening, but the bolt was on the side of the door that the children were on. A man ended up taking the hinges off the door, but even then, only one child at time could be pulled through the door by adults, leaving those trapped suffocating until they could be reached.

One of the results of the tragedy was laws in England demanding venues of certain capacities have a certain number of outward-facing exit doors. The other was that Robert Alexander Briggs invented the push bar, also called the crash bar.

How Panic Bars Help Us Avoid Human Crushes

These bars run across the door and automatically unlatch it with pressure. That means if anyone is being pressed against the door, it will open outward without them having to find the latch or work against the pressure of a crowd. That is, as long as the door is designed to open outward. It also is important that there are enough doors and wide enough doors for the number of people in the venue.

Human crush situations don’t just happen to children. Adults have created crush deaths many times before. The people at the back of the crowd are applying pressure, and they frequently cannot see what is going on at the front of the line. They don’t know to stop moving forward, and the space between them and the people in front of the shrinks until they too are being pushed by the people behind them.

Push Bars in the United States

It wasn’t until the 1903 Collinwood school fire that there was a national push to mandate push bars and other fire-safety mechanisms in the United States.

Now, most commercial properties are mandated to have push bars on all of their exterior doors. If you’re not sure if your doors need or have push bars, it’s wise for you to reach out to commercial door experts in Folsom today.