In The 19th Century, People Really Freaked Out About Buttons (And They Were Kind Of Right To)

But just about every development in history comes with its own moral panic. Even as far back as Socrates, we can find hand-wringing about the development and spread of writing itself – it would, the thinker lamented, destroy human memory. In the 18th century, it was the birth of the novel, which people feared would drive young women to mass suicide; a century later, it was train travel – moving at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour(!) would, of course, make travelers’ uteruses fly out of their body. How could you not worry?!

The push button is no exception to this rule. They started popping up everywhere in the late 19th century, starting in doorbells, then light switches, alarm clocks, flashlights, until eventually they were everywhere you looked.

And, as is tradition, people freaked the hell out. But why?

A hot button issue

The concept of “press this and something will happen” isn’t all that new – after all, the harpsichord has been around since the 14th century, and the organ is far older again, dating from some 2,400 years ago at least.

But of course, both of those examples are eminently understandable. Open the case of a harpsichord, and you can see exactly how the keys act like levers: you press one end, and the other raises, plucking a string as it does so to produce the sound. Could the same be said of, say, a doorbell?

Even in the earliest days of electrical push buttons, the answer was generally thought to be “no” – and some believed that was a problem. 

“The fact that so often in modern America one may press a button and be served, seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button,” lamented educator and activist Dorothy Canfield Fisher in her 1916 childrearing guide Self-Reliance. “It is also apparent that for the naturally indolent mass of humanity, and for children with no experience of life, there is a great danger of coming to rely so entirely on the electric button and its slaves that the wheels of initiative will be broken, or at least become rusty from long disuse.”

In other words: having a device just work at the touch of a button would stop people from understanding how it worked – stop them from even being interested in understanding it, in fact. And here’s the thing: for almost all of us, Fisher wasn’t really wrong, was she?

Modern ignorance

Unless you’re an engineer, or just oddly interested, you probably don’t know exactly how pressing a button becomes a called elevator or a switched TV channel. But that wasn’t always the case: “At the end of the nineteenth century many laypersons had a working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pressed and the relationship between the two,” wrote Rachel Plotnick, now an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, in a paper back in 2012.

“In formal classroom settings, educators taught students in elementary schools how to create electric bells, buzzers, and buttons,” she explained; “indeed, schools considered building these household electric devices an important part of students’ science curriculum.”

School wasn’t the only place kids would learn about electronics. We’ve all seen those old-timey radioactivity for kids kits – the same kinds of things were available for electrical doohickeys, too; magazines and books aimed at children encouraged them to investigate how electric bells and buttons worked, and even instructed on how to build them from first principles. 

“An article in the Atlanta Constitution in 1900 titled ‘A Boy and a Bell’ detailed how a boy should go about constructing his first bell for his mother,” Plotnick pointed out; “in a section called ‘The Push Button,’ the author noted that ‘the push button is so simple that the average boy can take two pieces of thin sheet brass, copper, or iron and make a temporary one in a few minutes.’”

Could you do that today?

Pushing the button

If people were so worried about losing their curiosity and understanding of electricity, you might wonder, how come the push button is so ubiquitous today? Did the push button… win?

Well, yes – and the reason why is our old friend capitalism.

“Unlike educators and hobbyists, many others, particularly those working in the electrical industry, promulgated a view of early push buttons as nonintimidating and effortless faces of electricity,” Plotnick explained. “This meant lauding these switches for their ability to automatically deliver incredible electrical forces at a mere touch, without the necessity (or cause) for users’ tinkering or in-depth understanding.”

With increasingly few exceptions, people were happy to accept the ease of just pressing a button and getting what you want – and companies exploited and encouraged that tendency. Edison Electric advertised push button-lights as essentially life-saving – the world before them, they implied, being one ruled by thieves and filled with accidental maimings – and Kodak famously boasted that “You press the button, we do the rest”. Any deeper knowledge than that was both unnecessary and increasingly difficult to obtain.

The death of our electrical nous didn’t come unopposed. In the 1910s and 20s, there was a resurgence of experts and old-timey influencers advocating for a better understanding of how buttons and electrics worked together. But it was too late: by that point, so many things had buttons that people were used to them, and didn’t particularly care to learn more.

“The button’s simple design, on/off capabilities, and symbolic power meant that few people needed to know what happened behind the interface,” Plotnick wrote. “It [was] unclear whether industry officials could turn back this tide.”