2 Ringing for Service

The practice of ringing bells served an important function in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in fact the bell acted as “a proxy for all sorts of relations” between people.² To understand how buttons began to achieve prominence as communication and control mechanisms requires understanding bells and bell ringing as a popular method of signaling, warning, garnering attention, and making demands. One might find push-button bells in a variety of places, but they first achieved prominence as fire-alarm mechanisms. In 1870, inventor Edwin Rogers designed a fire-alarm repeater and included a push button in his designs. Deemed the “inventor of the electric push button” years later in his obituary (the only fleeting mention of buttons having any one “inventor” at all), Rogers identified a need for instant action and reaction—and signals that could replicate over distance—to engage the appropriate parties in fire response.³ Rogers’ repeater made it possible for an alarm triggered at the location of one box on the street to strike multiple bells and gongs throughout the system, sending an alert without the aid of a central operator.⁴ A finger on a button worked to make these signals rapid and communicable with little human intervention, and this repeater technology offered particular value to small towns that could not afford a central office system.⁵ Observers took note of the “electric communication between all quarters of towns, and between many houses, and numerous fire-stations ... everywhere” made possible by a finger’s pressure upon a button.⁶ Large buildings frequently employed push-button signals given the potential for fire or other kinds of emergencies in those spaces. Public theaters, for example, featured push buttons in glass cases to trigger alarms in case of fire, a kind of early panic button that equated the technology with warning and disaster.⁷ Theater fires were all too common: by 1878, fires had destroyed 516 facilities, prompting routine installation of fire-alarm boxes in most of these spaces.⁸

This case of pushing buttons in emergency situations demonstrated the potential potency of exerting minimal effort to signal across distance, to command responders to action. Such a concept took root from the factory floor to the bank, where call bells facilitated information transfer among employers, employees, customers, and others in ways that did not (theoretically) disrupt the flow of work.⁹ Of all these locales, hotels were the primary early adopters who integrated bell outfits into every part of their operations, and these establishments pioneered many of the push-button advancements that ultimately trickled down into other spheres.¹⁰ Renowned hotels, such as the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and other upscale American hotels, began to provide the push-button feature to patrons in the mid-1800s.¹¹ Large hotels required elaborate electrical systems to make push-button connections among their various parts. A hotel with 500 rooms across six to ten stories might require 1,200 electrical appliances, including bells, buttons, and speaking tubes.¹² Within these systems, many hotels employed an “annunciator,” a kind of pre-intercom push-button system that linked up rooms, the central office, halls for chambermaids, engine rooms, the laundry, and any other places where proprietors might want communication.¹³

In its simplest form, the annunciator functioned by enabling an individual to press a push button that would close the electrical circuit; this push triggered a “drop” in the hotel office (the drop was usually a card, needle with a pointer, or flag moved by an electromagnet), that would indicate which room number made the call while also activating a bell to ring (see figure 2.1).¹⁴ The attendant could then visit the guest’s room in question to receive orders and carry out a task as needed. Inventors expanded on this design so that guests could make specific requests rather than waiting for a bellboy to visit the room (see figure 2.2). The engineer F. Benedict Herzog, for example, created the popular “Herzog Telesme,” an annunciator that enabled the guest to ask for anything from a bottle of champagne, to a bottle of ink, to one’s luggage. The guest would move a pointer on a dial to the object she required in her room and press a button, transmitting a “signal that indicates on the board at the office just what is called for.”¹⁵ In addition to its practical function, which aimed to make the button push more intelligible, the Telesme played on well-known psychology that people liked to press buttons for instant gratification to summon one’s desires with the touch of a finger. Other systems took a telegraphic approach, which, like the bell-pull system that preceded it, required the pusher to indicate her desire with an assigned number of pushes.

Although the notion of pushing a button took hold in large buildings in the mid-nineteenth century, in domestic contexts people did not push to ring bells; rather, they pulled. Mechanical bell pulls were most common, which required a strong tug of a cord often made of silk. These pulls reflected Victorian fashion, and women often hand-stitched them. They reflected “individuality ... in both design and execution” and were an “indispensable item in the catalogue of feminine accomplishments.”¹⁶ The communication of messages via bell pulls sometimes required only one pull, whereas other systems functioned more like telegraphing a message, in that one pull signaled for a servant’s attendance, two requested fuel, three pulls asked for light, four for water, and so on.¹⁷ The practice of pulling bells substituted for in-person requests because social etiquette deemed it bad form to “call out” to servants.¹⁸

Although popular in the United States and abroad, especially in well-to-do homes, bell pulls garnered a great deal of negative attention. Some complained of the physical effort and awkward hand movements required to actuate bells, as in the case of one user, George Edwinson (1883), who remarked, “What an immense amount of muscular energy is expended every day in pulling bells!”¹⁹ He went on to ask, “Can’t you men of science devise some better method of summoning our servants and making them acquainted with the fact that some person desires their presence?”²⁰ Users indicted the difficulty of pulling bells properly because horizontal jerks of the pull could cause the cord to break or the decorative tassel to come off in one’s hand.²¹ Stories about using bell pulls went as far as to suggest that only an “extremely athletic man,” using two hands and firmly planted feet, could cause a bell pull to move.²² In other instances, bell pullers lamented that bell ropes routinely went out of order so that they did nothing at all, either broken or hanging limp and loose.²³

Early doorbells, which also functioned by a pull, usually of a knob, garnered similarly unsavory reports. According to one experienced user, “You pull its clammy knob out of its rusty socket, let it go, and listen. No sound. You pull it a little further out, and listen again. Less sound. You lug it forcibly out of its socket to its fullest length, and let it fly like a catapult, and there is a slight tinkle-tinkle in the distant down below.”²⁴ Much to the author’s chagrin, only after one’s “fourth and final paroxysm” at the pull would the caller get a response.²⁵ Known for the forceful hand movements required to activate them, bell pulls married a forceful tug with a forceful demand for a servant’s or attendant’s presence.

Those homes without knobs for doorbells featured doorknockers made of heavy metals like brass, and they often displayed ornate carvings or embellishments. Like bell pulls, they usually reflected the character of the house’s architectural style. For some, this unique construction recommended pulls for the way they interacted with individual hands. In fact, a fiction story told from the perspective of a doorbell illustrated this viewpoint. According to the doorbell, “I assure you we can distinguish between rough and kindly touches, and aggressive pulls and circumspect pulls, and insolence and courtesy,” suggesting that, although pulls might generate frustration, they also related to a wide variety of distinct human touches.²⁶ As with the unique and handcrafted nature of bell-pull material, how people used their hands to knock on doors related to hand strength as well as personality.

Beginning in the 1870s, push buttons to actuate bells rose to prominence with the advent of electricity, which necessitated new ways of arranging these signaling devices as well as new methods for triggering them to ring. Electric bell outfits were operated by a battery; rather than a pull, the ringer would press a wired push button that would close an electrical circuit.²⁷ In contrast to the bell pull, the electric button limited what the user could do with her hands based on the palette of sounds available. Buttons did not ring harder or louder if pressed with more force or intensity; therefore, their use created the conditions for a new sensory, kinesthetic, and aesthetic experience. Indeed, descriptions of push-button bells emphasized that, “A gentle pressure upon a small button effects all that is required. The electric force that rings the bell steals noiselessly along the wire, there is no sound, there is no strain; but the bell gives forth its warning sound as though it were rung by the stout arm of some invisible sprite.”²⁸ This “gentle pressure” of the finger and electric force noiselessly carrying along wires differed quite significantly from prior descriptions of actuating bells or knockers, which required rigorous and athletic movements and generated a host of sounds that corresponded with the hand’s individual knock or pull. In this regard, pushes presented a new model for calling someone to action. Noted one user of another popular style bell, “Bells you bang on tables hurt your fingers, and invoke bad language—but not the servant. I never knew a good-tempered household that used bang-bells at the table. They are a standing invitation to violence, whereas the press-bell pleads for gentleness and restraint.”²⁹ Some equated the minimal or “gentle” hand intervention required for pushing with a more polite, discreet, and therefore gentle form of managing household staff.

Reports varied widely on whether pushing a button to operate an electric bell constituted an improvement or a hindrance compared with the bell pull. Some saw the act of pushing as representative of a new modern era, as in the words of one writer: “The knocker is out of date. A pull is passé. It now takes an electrified punch.”³⁰ To these enthusiastic adopters, bell pulls were viewed as “elderly,” and “grandma and grandpa can’t quite reconcile themselves to this modern method of pressing a button, but would feel happier if they could be permitted to pull something.”³¹ To this end, a number of observers remarked that push-button bells in public places often accompanied signs marked “Bell” and “Push” to move along “the slowness of people to acquire new habits.”³² Those who lamented the arrival of push buttons criticized the “press-the-button-fiend” and lamented, “With the brusqueness characteristic of the times we are instructed to PUSH this modern startler.”³³ Comments like this one reflected a perspective that pushing constituted more than just a change in mechanism; it also symbolized a shift in philosophy regarding the forcefulness, speed, and “pushiness” of the electrification and industrialization era.

As a result, remaking the act of pushing as a nonforceful one—converting pushiness into “mere touch”—constituted one of the primary projects of this time period. To do so, in part, involved redefining pulling and pushing metaphorically and philosophically beyond the hand movement. The “pushing” person typically connoted someone self-made and industrious. Indeed, “The ‘push’ individual is like the bird which has graduated from the nest and is able to forage on its own account; the ‘pull’ person is like the weakling in the nest which requires constant feeding in order to prevent it from starving.”³⁴ Similarly, an editorial on the social climber who could advance her position from one social status to the next (1880) noted that, “Pushing is carried on with very unequal degrees of skill. There is a clumsy and an adroit kind. Just as a man may physically push his way through a crowd in a rough fashion, calling everybody’s attention to his exertions, while another will get through quite as effectively without any disturbance or appearance of effort.”³⁵ In an interesting turn, the “pusher”—whether pushing to achieve a better social position or actuate a push button—achieved success when exerting as little effort as possible, gently charming her associates.

Although electricity served as a major topic of curiosity and consternation in the late nineteenth century, electric bells received little attention as novelties due to their simplicity; they were one of the most “familiar examples” of electricity and became popular before widespread public use of the telegraph and even helped to make that device possible.³⁶ According to an encyclopedia entry on the topic (1880), “The ringing of bells is not a recent application of electricity, but it is only a few years since electric bells have been placed in many public and private buildings instead of the well-known bell hanging arrangement with wires and cranks. ... In every room which communicates with a bell there is a ‘press-button’ or little spring by which the current of electricity is put off or on as we may wish.”³⁷ Eventually, the push button was used for ringing a bell both indoors and outside and was perceived as “too common to require description,” according to John Henry Pepper (1881), and “so well known that we need not describe it,” in the words of E. Hospitalier and C. J. Wharton (1889) in their book Domestic Electricity for Amateurs.³⁸ However, despite a perception of push buttons’ ordinariness—especially for those in the electrical industry—early push-button communication, especially in domestic contexts, occurred primarily between those people and in those spaces already enjoying the privileges of wealth before in-home telephones became common.³⁹ Early users were also commonly urban users, and although these “city dwellers ha[d] come to believe in the prevalence of the electric button,” they constituted but a mere fraction of the larger population.⁴⁰ This observation is unsurprising given that most homes were not wired for electricity until well into the twentieth century.⁴¹ Indeed, many homes at the turn of the twentieth century did not even have doorbells, such as tenements in New York, where by 1890 the doorbell was “practically an unknown institution” (see figure 2.3).⁴² According to educator Jennie Darlington (1889), “I have known persons who were afraid to have an electric bell in the house, and have been told that such cases are common. These persons are even afraid to ring an electric door-bell.”⁴³

Middle- to upper-class homes and large city apartment buildings were commonly outfitted with push-button systems that could make interactions less laborious. As in hotels, annunciators were often installed in apartment houses to help individuals carry out tasks from many stories above, such as summoning a messenger boy, calling a carriage, or requesting an object from the cellar. Using an electric button on the wall in each room, someone could push a button and turn a marble handle to indicate the service she desired. Noted an article on the subject, “In a moment or two, a servant knocks at the door with the thing you called for. ... It is an odd way to live, far up in the air above the house-tops.”⁴⁴ As early as 1892, thousands of people in New York “wonder[ed] how they ever got along without their annunciators, telephones, bell-calls, door-openers and elevators.”⁴⁵ Servants in these buildings used such systems to carry out the business of the day. Upon receiving a call from a peddler, for example, a maid could choose to respond at a distance by using a speaking tube to get more information, trigger a door to unlock for his entry, or wait quietly for the peddler to go away.⁴⁶ City children, too, would often have exposure to “a few simple phenomena; a push of a button—a bell is rung; another push—a door is unlocked; another push—a light appears.”⁴⁷ They would come to have familiarity with the fact that “the modern apartment is a complicated structure operated by buttons.”⁴⁸ A rapidly changing cityscape necessitated new devices like the push button to manage information and communication.

In electrified homes, large spaces demanded a means for managing staff, services, and the comings and goings of dwellers and visitors. Electrical catalogs, product manuals, housekeepers’ guides, electricians’ plans, and numerous other instructional documents weighed in on various methods for constructing and using buttons to facilitate communication in domestic spaces.⁴⁹ Electrical materials—bells, push buttons, batteries, and wire—had also become affordable to the point that one could realistically achieve home installations and fixes.⁵⁰ Homeowners expected servants to respond to bell calls as part of their daily responsibilities, which also included cleaning and bringing fresh water.⁵¹ Some were even required to repair these bells and their associated buttons.⁵²

As electric bells began to replace mechanical ones, electricians and homeowners advocated for doing away with unsightly wires that had previously accompanied bell pulls in favor of a harmonious push-button faceplate. Indeed, “At first it was usual to expose the wires to view along the walls and ceilings, even in the best houses,” Edward and Francis Spon (1886) wrote in a manual to mechanics, “until the ‘secret system’ was introduced, which consists in carrying the wires and cranks and tubes and boxes concealed by the finishings of the walls.”⁵³ Bells pulled by mechanical wires suffered from significant limitations in how bell hangers could install them in a house; wires ran in a straight line and often snapped, which required expensive repairs and pulling up of carpets and rugs to remedy the situation.⁵⁴ As a result, advocates for the “secret system” appealed not to homeowners’ safety or security but rather to their aesthetic sensibilities. Bell hangers advocated for plans in which “not a single wire is seen in any room” to improve how a house looked.⁵⁵ This kind of pitch often appeared in advertisements for electrical products, as in the illustrated catalog of The Stout-Meadowcroft Company of New York (1885), where electricians assured that electrical apparatuses would cause “no inconvenience to the family or injury to the property as all wires are laid in concealed spaces by hands skilled in electric work.”⁵⁶ In fact, the concealment strategy featured prominently in the electrical home, so that “the battery, which is enclosed in a neat box 9 x 15 inches, can be located in a closet or other convenient place, where a small space can be spared, as it emits no disagreeable or offensive odor, and it needs attention but once or two a year.”⁵⁷

Nevertheless, this goal presented a number of problems. One could encounter difficulties concealing wires by simply papering over them with wallpaper because this strategy created uneven lumps and attracted dust. By contrast, wires embedded at an earlier stage in plaster often caused inconvenience when it came to eventual repairs.⁵⁸ Patent descriptions often remarked at the difficulty of repairing embedded buttons and their wires, given that most designs privileged aesthetics over functionality and made their working parts hopelessly out of reach.⁵⁹ Beyond this problem of embedding, rats and mice were common enemies to electrical mechanisms and were viewed as but one of a number of antagonists to properly working buttons, including short-circuited wires, slow make-and-break action, and the seeping in of foreign substances.⁶⁰ As a result, bells and lights notoriously malfunctioned, and when they didn’t ring or stay on constantly, they often remained out of order for days when city residents didn’t bother to have them fixed.⁶¹ Even if someone wished to outsource push-button repair, she might find it difficult to contract the right help. Most bell hangers and electricians refused to waste their time with these minor electric mechanisms, preferring more elaborate wiring jobs.⁶² Tension existed, then, between the promise of push-button magic—which relied on hiding the formerly “visible medium” of the wire and crank—and problems of accessibility and maintenance.⁶³

Just as hiding wires away served an aesthetic function to make electricity more attractive in homes, so too did push-button designs offer a new opportunity to integrate control mechanisms into the surfaces of everyday life. Buttons could cover up a home’s past technologies by erasing blemishes of the past. For instance, electricians recommended buttons in circumstances when homeowners chose to remove mechanical bells and replace them with electric ones. To get rid of the “ugly looking hole” left in the door, one technician recommended “naturally look[ing] to the electric push button as the most suitable thing to help us out.”⁶⁴ Whereas bell pulls and their wires stuck out in plain view, electricians could insert push buttons inside walls, into floors, in desks, tables, and other surfaces so that they blended unobtrusively with their surroundings. By bringing these controls discreetly into living and working spaces, architects and electricians advocated for a new era in which “the controls of machines were grouped around the operator” so that the controller could access anything—or anyone—at an arm’s length.⁶⁵ Calls for reachability often involved appeals to safety, convenience, or relaxation, and in the case of push buttons, they married the notion of a “single touch” and effortless engagement with the benefits of electrification. Electricians, architects, consumer product manufacturers, and others imagined users as ergonomically situated “armchair generals” (although neither the concepts of “ergonomics” or the “armchair general” existed yet in this specific language) who could comfortably control and communicate with the “mere touch” of a finger from anywhere. Such visions applied to specific users in positions of authority and to a certain class that could direct the movements and activities of others rather than undertake those movements themselves.

Along with using call bells and buttons to facilitate homeowner–servant relationships across distance, push-button bell systems also provided an opportunity for homeowners to protect their domiciles by acting as a form of enforcement, drawing on earlier uses of fire-alarm buttons. In popular magazines and newspapers, authors routinely described the alarm button as a comforting measure in one’s home for those who feared intrusion. An article titled “Electricity in the Household” (1897) noted, “The class of persons who retain the traditional fear of the hidden burglar find great consolation in the secret push-button placed at the head of the bed and connected with an alarm at the nearest police station. ... The sensation of noiselessly touching the button and knowing that the more busily the gruesome visitor is engaged the more certain is his capture at the hands of the policemen who are hastening from the station, must be unique.”⁶⁶ As with the discreet push affixed to the homeowner’s table leg, the alarm button, secret and silent, performed a vital service for those who sought to enforce the boundaries of their homes by getting in touch.

Electrical supply companies sold burglar alarm apparatuses that offered “ABSOLUTE protection from Thieves” while also giving information about servants’ comings and goings.⁶⁷ These outfits ranged in price from $2 to $25 depending on the materials in use.⁶⁸ The homeowner might even sleep with a push button under her pillow or hang a button from a cord above her bed to stun an intruder.⁶⁹ These various embedded surveillance tools created communication and feedback loops within domestic spaces, making them intelligible to their owners and disciplining the bodies that inhabited them.⁷⁰ Electricians often made detailed drawings and measurements of homes to provide complete alarm solutions that considered how these bodies would interact; they thought holistically about alarms as networks rather than independent mechanisms.⁷¹ Early adopters of call bells and burglar alarms included noteworthy businessmen such as railroad magnates George Pullman and Perry H. Smith, who hired electricians to set up their Chicago homes.⁷² The wealthier set had the means to install new electric alarm mechanisms, and they also possessed desirable goods that they perceived as needed protecting in the first place.

In public contexts, push buttons served as formidable defense mechanisms by facilitating quick action and reaction against burglars. Due to this fact, banks commonly installed push-button alarms, providing tellers and managers with protection from robbers who frequently assailed these businesses and even took the lives of employees.⁷³ Electrician and inventor Thomas Edison, an early and outspoken proponent of push buttons, encouraged bankers to hire electricians to install secret alarm buttons in all banks. Edison imagined that invisible buttons could make the difference between victimization and control. According to The Electrical Journal (1896), which interviewed the inventor, “Part of the floor about the entrance to the bank president’s office could be arranged with metal plates so as to be charged with a high current of electricity when desired. The wires and other fixtures could be concealed beneath the carpet, or even in the flooring, without difficulty.”⁷⁴ The article concluded, “The entire arrangement should be controlled by a button underneath the banker’s desk. Even the button might be out of sight beneath a rug or carpet. This would be an immense advantage in an emergency.”⁷⁵ The banker could alert police with a concealed button and a simple press. Far from fiction alone, Edison’s vision in fact did come to fruition only a year later with an invention that allowed a banker under duress to push his foot on an emergency button that would send all money cabinets into lockdown and transmit a signal to call attention to the situation.⁷⁶ In this case, as with the homeowner demanding the presence of her servant, the button could facilitate a gentle and unassuming interaction that belied its forcefulness.

Tinkering communities often took interest in burglar alarms, which household inventors adapted simply by applying push-button bells to doors, windows, curtains, and other points of entry.⁷⁷ For the “householder with a scientific turn of mind,” a temporary alarm could be constructed with wire, a battery cell, and a button at little cost.⁷⁸ In fact, the “average family junk box” contained the materials necessary to put an alarm in place.⁷⁹ Homemade projects were common as well because many alarms were not eligible to receive patents due to their ubiquity, as in the case for a product created by C. P. Jones of Colorado, who invented a safe connected to push buttons in the floor that would sound an alarm in a police station if activated.⁸⁰ Buttons’ affordability, accessibility, and familiarity meant that many similar and iterative products circulated that were constructed by amateur tinkerers for individual use.

More broadly, authors of educational materials encouraged novices to take up push-button construction and repair for household projects and to think creatively about their uses.⁸¹ These craft projects served to reinforce a “dominant ideology” because hobbyists usually created objects similar to those in the commercial world, and they “work[ed] in a socially prescribed way.”⁸² Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century men and women often received instructions to rationalize their leisure time and were urged not to “waste” it by being productive outside of working hours; children were similarly taught at young ages not to succumb to laziness.⁸³ In this context, push-button tinkering fit within broader social norms that demonized “idleness” and valued work as a form of leisure.⁸⁴ Given push buttons’ common association with opulence and laziness, users could reappropriate them by working with their hands rather than calling on someone else to do the work.

Numerous publications cropped up to help these tinkerers manage a growing set of electrical tools, but these were targeted primarily toward electrical experimenters and do-it-yourself types. Popular and academic texts often featured lessons on how buttons worked, describing electrical circuits and pushes for “on” and “off” in their first few pages. Titles such as Domestic Electricity for Amateurs (1889), Everybody’s Hand-book of Electricity (1890), Electricity in Daily Life (1890), Popular Electric Lighting (1898), and many others provided detailed instructions and visual diagrams on buttons as electrical components.⁸⁵ Magazine articles, including “Electricity Applied to Household Affairs” (1893), “Electricity in the Household” (1897), and “Electricity as a Domestic” (1901), specifically addressed home repair for the mechanically inclined.⁸⁶ Although most of these texts identified men as their primary constituents, others appealed to women because push-button switches and bells often fell under women’s jurisdiction as they appeared prominently in domestic spaces. Indeed, author Helena Higginbotham wrote to readers of Good Housekeeping (1905) that she had wired nine homes beside her own, and she articulated that any woman could easily gain this knowledge. Describing problems that someone might encounter when installing electric bells, Higginbotham gave special attention to push buttons and their potential misfires.⁸⁷ Rather than inaccessible, taken-for-granted mechanisms, buttons appeared in this text and others discussed earlier as simple technical objects that individuals of all ages should understand. These lessons viewed buttons as but one of many conduits that conveyed electricity and required education and exploration.

Many educators sought to inculcate the public so that they might adopt electricity broadly and without hesitation, given widespread reticence toward electrification.

Where it might prove difficult to persuade adults to use electricity, many educators believed that children, as first-generation button pushers, would not encounter buttons with the same distrust. Learning about a button’s mechanisms could replace buttons’ magical properties with a more practical rationality about electricity; to this end, push buttons acted as gateways to more broadly understanding electrical forces and indoctrinating the next generation of users.⁸⁸ This practical approach sought to demystify button mechanisms and make them mundane for children by linking them to lessons about how to “make” and “break” electrical circuits or connect an electric bell. For example, one educator concluded, “A little child, however, after observing a few simple experiments in electricity, probably thinks with perfect coolness when he touches an electric bell knob, ‘Now I have closed the current.’” She noted, “We have not yet given the very smallest children the experiments in electricity, but mean to do so before long, and they are such as to remove the feeling of awe (as of unnatural agency) that many have for electricity.”⁸⁹

Such education often began in formal classroom settings for American youth, where educators taught students in elementary schools how to create electric bells, buzzers and buttons; schools considered construction of these household electric devices an important part of students’ science curriculums. Even beyond the classroom, an incredible wealth of books and magazines targeted school-aged tinkerers, encouraging them to explore and understand their physical world, including the push buttons that animated their everyday environments. Buttons were relatively inexpensive and simple electrical mechanisms, meaning that novices could purchase or construct their own buttons.

Educators typically described boys as their target audience for lessons about electricity and magnetism because they believed that boys had a natural affinity for working with machines, and they assumed that boys gravitated toward and possessed a “remarkable ability for mechanical work” more so than they would take an interest in history or literature.⁹⁰ Views about gender roles led most professionals to agree that girls, too, could benefit from lessons on “domestic economy” and the simple devices such as a push button that one might operate in a home.⁹¹ In educational journals, many teachers proposed a hands-on approach to electricity, where students could utilize the classroom as a laboratory for tinkering with objects they encountered outside of school: “We are not only acquainting our pupils with the great truths of science,” wrote one educator, “but we are creating and fostering that most desirable and productive quality, the ‘scientific habit of mind.’”⁹² The notion of an active education, promoted by many such as John Dewey, envisioned the push button as a “situation” for children to encounter electricity and make a connection between a push of the finger and a ring of the bell.⁹³ Understanding how push buttons worked played an integral role, in educators’ estimations, of thinking scientifically and rationally about everyday technologies.

Given the intrigue that surrounded push buttons and their ubiquity in so many contexts, teachers also viewed buttons and other electrical tools as a way to “hook” students to appreciate science more generally.⁹⁴ Paul H. Hanus, professor of education, asked his colleagues, “Why cannot we begin natural science with the study of the push button, the camera, the electric light or the lighting of a match? ... All studies should be taught with reference to their social significance.”⁹⁵ Teacher Otis W. Caldwell similarly commented that concrete experiments—building and taking apart electric bells, examining telephones, telegraphs, and dynamos—enabled students to fully grasp their lessons.⁹⁶

Beyond these lessons in classrooms about push buttons, a wide swath of print literature—popular newspapers, magazines, and books—also encouraged children to take an interest in constructing bells, buzzers, and buttons. Texts included Questions and Answers about Electricity: A First Book for Students (1892), Real Things in Nature: A Reading Book of Science for American Boys and Girls (1903), and The Sciences: A Reading Book for Children (1904), each of which included a section on buttons and their relationship to electricity.⁹⁷ One exemplar, Things a Boy Should Know about Electricity (1900) outlined various uses of push buttons for aspiring young male engineers, including affixing buttons to windows and doors for burglar alarms.⁹⁸ Similarly, an article in the Atlanta Constitution from the same year titled “A Boy and a Bell” detailed how a boy should go about constructing his first bell for his mother. 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.”⁹⁹ Another instructional piece recommended that experimenters craft push buttons from inexpensive materials like aluminum and plaster of Paris.¹⁰⁰ Books in later years, such as Harper’s Electricity Book for Boys (1907), told readers about push buttons’ important role in making and breaking electrical connections, unpacking their logic while emphasizing how buttons related to the electrical circuit’s overall functionality.¹⁰¹ Although many texts targeted professional scientists and inventors, this primer and others focused on the ways that children could tangibly and meaningfully interact with electricity by beginning at the site of the push button.

On the surface, electricians and other inventors designed push buttons with accessibility in mind, surmising that users—whether young or old—should readily understand and possess the physical strength to operate push-button bells. Yet numerous anecdotes suggest that everyday experiences with buttons ran counter to these ideals. The tenet that anyone could push a button came with a host of baggage about what “anyone” would do with a push button and who exactly qualified as “anyone.” Pushers routinely experienced confusion about how buttons worked and what effect they would produce, or they deliberately took advantage of buttons’ technical simplicity for their own ends. Given a common perception that people should naturally know how to push buttons to achieve a desired result, to have an accident, mishap, or confusing experience with an electric button thus constituted an example of ignorance worth reporting (and perhaps even mocking). In terms of push-button malfunction, one “awfully mortified” user complained of a stuck push-button bell that would not stop ringing. She picked at it with her gloves and jabbed at it with her cane until an exasperated woman from the third story of the building poured a pitcher of water on her down below.¹⁰² In another instance, hotel guests repeatedly heard bells ringing in a hotel although they did not push the button. Eventually, after hearing repeated rings, they began to tell ghost stories as the only plausible explanation. Only later, once an electrician came for inspection, did they learn that rats had eaten through the wires and caused them to form a circuit that “kept the bells ringing merrily.”¹⁰³

Accounts of user confusion often described button pushers as bumbling but harmless. A Texas newspaper, for example, reported such an event in 1899 when an “old gentleman” went to a firehouse to buy tickets for a firehouse ball and pressed a button in the station, unknowingly setting off a fire alarm. “The effect was electrical in every sense of the word,” the paper noted. “From the air overhead—so, at least it seemed to the old gentleman in his bewilderment—men began to rain down.”¹⁰⁴ Luckily, the article concluded, everyone enjoyed a good chuckle over the false alarm, and the innocent gentleman left with his ticket to the ball. Another story (1892) poked fun at a farmer unfamiliar with the ways that servants could trigger a front door of an apartment building to open upon the visitor’s button push, noting that the farmer thought the wind had blown the door open.¹⁰⁵ Yet a third (1892) humorously recounted how a sleepwalking man showed up at one o’clock in the morning ringing a doorbell on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and demanding his pants, only to awaken from his unconscious state upon confrontation by a police officer.¹⁰⁶

At the same time, people who lacked the skill or cultural knowledge to push a button and carry out a task incurred embarrassment for their technological illiteracy. The act of pushing a button could blur the lines among skill, status, and expertise, but it also could make these delineations more visible in certain contexts. Public shaming of those who made errors with buttons served a social function of separating out electricity users from nonusers; this created an “in” group of those with know-how about the machine age.¹⁰⁷ In some cases, reports of electric button mishaps simply noted incidences of electrocution or injury, but others of embarrassment and inexperience—button pushing gone wrong—also served as a newsworthy topic.¹⁰⁸

These rejoinders against button pushers took a pejorative tact. Because push buttons often symbolized modernity and the strength of American technological achievement, those who could not use or understand buttons were marked as primitive and unworldly. For example, in a book recounting his experiences with Native Americans, author James Lee Humfreville (1897) took their unfamiliarity with buttons as a sign of their “savageness.” He wrote to this effect about one particular encounter: “Jim was ill at ease among the surroundings of modern life. He did not understand electricity and its marvels. He could not comprehend how by pressing an electric button in his room a waiter forthwith appeared at his door.”¹⁰⁹ This case and others proposed that every “civilized” and “modern” person should know how to push a button as part of a basic technological vocabulary, and that ignorance of this skill—or the appropriate social conventions for when to push—would give immediate evidence of the person’s difference. With use of the button came a firm belief in American progress, racial/cultural superiority, and a staunch supremacy over electricity and its mechanisms. By associating button pushing with a most basic form of everyday technical knowledge, more a life skill than a specialized skill meant for experts, newspapers and newsmagazines particularly differentiated between those “in the know” and those on the outside. Where electricians often disassociated themselves from buttons, which they perceived as common and ordinary devices, yet another level of hierarchy existed among laypersons by debasing those who couldn’t even successfully press a button.¹¹⁰ The act of pushing a button functioned as a societal litmus test, filtering out those too old or too foreign to participate in a growing machine culture. One had to prove her worthiness by demonstrating the basic technique of button pushing. Button usage exposed an embedded social hierarchy that delineated levels of expertise within layperson communities. Without the “right” use of the latest technology, one could easily find oneself portrayed as anachronistic or relegated to the punch line of a joke in a quickly evolving, machine-driven environment. A misstep with a button often produced slurs against the presser’s race, gender, age, or class, and thus button pushing served as an outlet for expressing preexisting tensions and negotiating power relations. Although a change from pull to push meant that all users touched the same, in fact this technical change belied disparities in the rights, privileges, and skills of those who pushed buttons.

This problematic between the notion of accessibility—making buttons readily understandable and available for all—and access especially came to the fore in discussions about children as button pushers. Although educators espoused the importance of encouraging early encounters with buttons, accounts of everyday practices suggest that adults often viewed child button pushers—usually male youth—as nuisances, prone to using buttons in ways that violated social norms or irritated those around them. One of the chief complaints about children involved their penchant for ringing bells on a whim. For example, on the grandest scale—at the White House—author Mary Smith Lockwood noted the importance of button-triggered bells in an exposé on US presidents’ wives that described a history of their household conveniences. Despite how far the presidential abode had come in its long-distance communication efforts, however, Lockwood discussed a comical scene in which President Harrison’s young grandson summoned the whole of the White House with an innocent (or not-so-innocent) touch of a button, asking, “Did not little Benjamin, when alone one day in his grandfather’s office, climb to his table, and by a touch here and there with his baby hand, set the whole force of secretaries, clerks and messengers on a chase to do his majesty’s bidding?”¹¹¹ Although rhetoric of a perfect household controlled by push buttons circulated extensively in the late nineteenth century, an underlying concern remained about whom should have the right to press buttons and what kind of authority they could command; the image of a gaggle of staff members jumping at a button’s demands (actuated by a small child) hinted at the potential backlash of a world populated by such devices. It also demonstrated that the value of reachability—putting buttons within reach of the average user (both physically and in terms of understanding) could come at a price.

Cases like this one with bells, although usually not on a nationally visible scale, led to technological interventions to manage child button pushers’ behavior that was common and widespread. According to Rudolph M. Hunter, when granted a push-button bell patent, button pushers caused great irritation by “needlessly annoy[ing]” those individuals within earshot by pushing buttons for too long.¹¹² Similarly, inventor A. J. Oehring (1893) sought to remedy problems with button pushers who “meddled” and caused mischief, whereas J. C. McLaughlin (1889) constructed a new mechanism to withstand the misuses of fingers that pushed buttons “without any particular purpose” until they burned out and broke.¹¹³ Indeed, an examination of patents reveals producers’ many complaints about how children pushed buttons, and these rejoinders flew in the face of advertisers’ romantic pronouncements about the reachability and universality of button pushing and button pushers.

Other measures were not so overt but nevertheless worked (and perhaps even more effectively so) to control how users pushed through invisible technical adjustments to buttons. In Rudolph M. Hunter’s (1893) patent for a push button, for example, the document noted that “boys have a mania for pushing in and holding the button in closed circuit for the supposed enjoyment of hearing the bell ring or for mischief.” He aimed to remedy this problem by creating a button with a bell that would automatically stop ringing after a set period of time, no matter how long the offending user pushed (see figure 2.4).¹¹⁴

Tips targeted at homeowners considering electrification were also sometimes advised to make buttons “secret” in their design and placement so as to prevent inappropriate uses by pranksters.¹¹⁵ Similarly, railroad car designers responded to what they perceived as push-button abuses by making sure to locate push buttons higher than usual on walls to prevent children from using them.¹¹⁶ Yet these interventions often generated rebukes as either ineffective or inconvenient. In the latter instance of railroad cars, this positioning generated backlash from irate adult customers who claimed that the “inaccessible location of the buttons,” which caused the average patron to have to rise from her seat to press it, required immediate remedy.¹¹⁷ Meanwhile, one observer perceived high positioning of buttons for children as a useless technique to ward against meddling. According to a commentator in Popular Mechanics:

This strategy of putting buttons out of reach failed to take into account the enterprising ways of youth.

It was not as though push buttons stimulated youthful pranks where none had existed before. In fact, some lamented an influx of push buttons as signaling the end of youthful amusements rather than stimulating new ones. According to a Mr. Stoggleton interviewed in the Boston Daily Globe, fun could once be had for the small boy with the door knocker “whose thunder reverberated through the hall and filled the house” and the old-fashioned bell pull by “yank[ing] the bell-pull out to the limit, causing the bell to fly almost off the spring.” In the present moment, however, he suggested that “there is no such fun in pushing in a push button. You can press that in perhaps a quarter of an inch, and that is all you can do with it. ... It is dry fun,” and he predicted that ringing the bell and running as a prank was quickly disappearing as a childhood pastime.¹¹⁹ Much as some mourned the loss of individuality of touch that doorknockers and bell pulls provided, this observer proposed that the simplistic and less dramatic push button symbolized an end to childish fun. Evidence indicates, however, that buttons continued to attract youthful fingers.

A problematic conflict existed, then, between desires to educate children and make them “good” consumers of push-button electricity and their tendencies toward pushing in ways deemed out-of-control and for the mere pleasure of pushing. Blurry lines between push-button-as-play and push-button-as-control-mechanism meant that bells were vulnerable to the hands that found them worthy of exploration, and they caused an affront to the ears when one did not expect or want to hear them. Buttons seemed to operate too well, as a child’s touch could turn the mechanism into a liability rather than a convenience. These kinds of problems with push-button bells demonstrated the complexity of digital command.

Notes