If you take a look at an office drawer it is actually a remarkable piece of technology. Two or more long rails are created to keep the drawer stable and it slides out using various mechanisms although the simplest method is simply to slide it along a long indentation on either side. One single handle is typically used to pull the office drawer out of the place it resides and it is incredibly simple to place items within it or take items from it as it is such an open design.
The origin of something so simple and yet so complex as an office drawer is actually very difficult to trace as no one person is known to be the creator and yet just looking at the office drawer itself it is obvious that the design is very complex and someone had to be inventive when they created it. It has been found that over five thousand years ago humankind was using various shelves to store their items and taking a leap from a simple shelf to an office drawer is not a huge undertaking, take a drawer away and you basically have a space that looks similar to a shelf.
The central problem with finding the origin of an office drawer is that wood rots, it’s a fact that wood rots and that stone does not make a very good material if you want to slide things through it. Therefore finding an example of an office drawer from antiquity is not a very easy task in fact it is virtually impossible. However finding examples of drawers from medieval times is easy as methods were created to preserve and restore wood over time, many examples of drawers created to store clothing still exist in this modern era.
Office drawer technology really took off when someone invented the desk and realised that a simple table could be used to work from and read upon, having a table to rest on was fine but having some storage space nearby was also a good idea and thus the drawer was used to create some cheap storage space. Today the humble office drawer helps us organise things in a very simple way but despite the importance of it we do not care about it as it is simply a thing that we take for granted. An office drawer must be appreciated for what it is; it is a very inventive piece of design.