Old refrigerators shut with a latch, a handle that clicked into a catch and could only be worked from the outside. Children playing hide-and-seek, or exploring a fridge left out by the curb, climbed in, the door swung to, and they could not get out. In 1956 Congress passed the Refrigerator Safety Act, and from late 1958 every household fridge sold in the United States had to open with a push of no more than fifteen pounds from inside. The law did not say how. Most makers answered it with a magnet: a strip in the door seal that holds well enough to keep the cold in and gives way to anyone who leans on it. So the small sticky resistance you feel when you pull a fridge open is not the door being stubborn. It was measured against the push of someone small, from the dark side.