4 Distant Effects

Where the practice of pushing a button to ring a bell worked to govern household and workplace help at a remove, other push-button acts functioned to demonstrate how one could command electricity and achieve spectacular effects across distances. Unlike servants or pages, who could refuse to present themselves in a timely manner (or at all), electricity—when it functioned properly—could appear instantly. By concealing electrical wires behind walls, wallpaper, and push-button faceplates, and by putting buttons in separate locations from that which they controlled, the severance of cause and effect could enable a thrill for spectators. One event that demonstrated this promise of distant effects and digital command involved a choreographed display by William Joseph Hammer, an associate and employee of Thomas Edison, who staged a reunion for his classmates in 1885 on New Year’s Eve. The Electrician journal reported on the event to electricity enthusiasts:

Not only did the unwitting visitor stumble through the electrical house experiencing shocks and thrills of a totally foreign nature, but the scene was made all the more impressive by Hammer’s omnipresent control. According to an official booklet published to record the momentous occasion, “The innumerable electrical devices shown during the progress of the dinner were all operated by Mr. Hammer, who controlled various switches fastened to the underside of the table and attached to a switchboard, which rested on his lap, while the two cannons were fired by lever switches on the floor, which he operated by the pressure of the foot.”⁴ Although the various switches, boards, and buttons employed by the host would likely have incurred notice by participants, Hammer made efforts to conceal these control mechanisms underneath his table, on his lap, and beneath his foot. This configuration gave him the role of puppet master pulling invisible strings, making electrical curiosities spring forth seemingly from nowhere with his body wholly wired into the system.

Merging concealment with electricity and control, the first electrical house demonstrated with spectacular versatility an important aspect of digital command. It identified a desire to focus on reachability as a key component of electrical control, and it involved the notion that controls should exist within one’s personal space with no need to reach for them. In Hammer’s experiment, push buttons functioned as a kind of “prosthetic” that enabled him to conjure swift effects with a simple touch of a finger.⁵ At the same time, the push-button spectacle demonstrated that buttons worked best when they could create magic. As F. J. Masten (1893) observed, “men like to push the button and let others do the rest, but we must not forget that these other fellows do not allow patrons to go behind the scenes; there must be no investigation of the secret springs and causes of action, for mystery is just what the button pushers like.”⁶ In significant contrast to the ways that housewives or managers commanded their employees—often without garnering a quick or pleasant response—electricity could produce the instantaneous magical effect so desired.

Although Hammer’s demonstration might have thrilled friends (other electrical experts), proponents of push-button control envisioned digital command as a broader practice for the masses by stressing that buttons should be “within reach of children and the domestics” and “pliable to man’s will,” with the proposition that anyone could take on the role of a digital commander.⁷ As with educators, the electrical industry also routinely linked mere touch particularly with youth and femininity; the act of touch signified humans’ ability to “tame” and master electricity, to turn any body from a subject to a master. To this end, push-button boosterism often centered on staging idealized spectacles of young girls pushing buttons to demonstrate how digital command could apply to the (supposed) lowest common denominator. One of the most widely discussed events took place on October 10, 1885, at 11:10 a.m., when 11-year-old Mary Newton pressed a telegraph key (whose bulbous end was commonly referred to as a “button”) to detonate dynamite that blew up a mine 1,000 feet away, spewing bits of rock into the air and making the earth tremble.⁸ Onlookers described the girl as the picture of poise and femininity, possessing a delicate touch in the midst of such power (see figure 4.1).

Common references to the button-pushing girl emphasized the violent, unexpected, or profound effects that her hand could achieve. Physician B. E. Dawson registered his wonder that “the little child’s delicate finger may touch a key and blow up Hell Gate,” referring to Newton’s push-button destruction of a bridge in New York.⁹ Similarly, author Elisha Gray marveled that “the most delicate touch of a child’s finger will be sufficient to release enough energy to destroy—in the twinkling of an eye—the largest battle-ship that ever plowed the ocean.”¹⁰ In another instance, according to Dr. R. A. Torrey in an allegorical Sunday school lesson to a group of children about Mary Newton’s push-button act, “I said ‘there is but little strength in my finger, but when I pray I put forth my weak finger and touch the arm of God, the arm that moves the universe, and that mighty arm moves to do its work.’”¹¹ This imagery of a weak finger activating a “mighty arm” served as a fitting representation for how push buttons could offload human labor onto machines by enabling a light touch. Each of these descriptions recalled the image of an unbalanced scale, dating back to the tale of David and Goliath, in which “tiny efforts balance out mighty weights.” Such a feat had long seduced with its promise of making the weak strong through mechanical interventions.¹² If hands no longer strained in effort, then humans could proclaim they had truly achieved a “reversal of forces.”¹³

Experimentation with distant control at a touch, such as Newton’s mine explosion, began with telegraphy. Not only could one send a message to someone at a location removed from the sender, but telegraphic communication also seemed to challenge how message senders and receivers thought about their bodies, for “Telegraph lines ... appeared to carry the animating ‘spark’ of consciousness itself beyond the confines of the physical body.”¹⁴ This notion of extending one’s consciousness through wires took on a particularly compelling character at world’s fair events, when a telegraph wired from a remote location to machinery at the event site could activate steam engines, lights, and other displays on the fairgrounds, as though an invisible hand had reached across thousands of miles to push a button. Such long-distance button events became increasingly popular—and even standard—at the turn of the twentieth century. These spectacles featured prominent figures and politicians, especially US presidents and their family members, as the button pushers to emphasize the political and physical importance of touch across distance.

It is no surprise that presidents and others would have employed the telegraph to appeal to fair audiences from a distance. This mode of communication and control greatly reduced expense and time commitment, and it also reinforced the ideals of the world’s fair and its rhetorical promise—as an “artificial realm” outside everyday reality—to expose visitors to the most cutting-edge technology in a celebration of national achievement.¹⁵ Visitors to a nineteenth-century fair would typically have far more electrical encounters than they had in their lives up to that point, experiencing novelties such as moving sidewalks, Ferris wheels, electric light displays, and animated fountains.¹⁶ By disguising the dangerous and unsavory aspects of these devices and cloaking them in spectacular and dramatic demonstrations, fairs served as powerful tools of persuasion through community engagement; these events were often designed to “win the hearts and minds” of participants, advancing hegemonic and imperialistic policies through expressions of regional and national pride.¹⁷ Never neutral in their presentations or representations, expositions in their other-worldliness encapsulated technological fantasies and fears, often acting as a suture between everyday experiences and larger societal concerns based on race, class, and gender.¹⁸ Through press coverage of button-pressing activities, because their remote nature meant that few experienced the event in person, lay audiences were asked to consider how push-button interfaces could both sensationalize electricity and profoundly extend their sense of touch. Media discourses provide insight into the ways in which journalists framed issues of human–machine relationships in the context of national pride, spectacle, and performativity with technology.

Descriptions of male button-pushing hands in these contexts—US presidents and other males holding high-level political offices—referred at once to masculine virility, natural disaster, and masterful taming of electricity.¹⁹ These touches were portrayed as summoning the mightiest power, commanding electrical forces to do the pusher’s bidding (see figure 4.2). Reports often used language such as, “The electric current will come bounding fresh from the hand of President Cleveland.”²⁰ Language of this kind emphasized the generative power of hands, or as science author Arthur E. Kennelly (1891) put it, “The relation between electricity and vitality may be so close as to amount to identity.”²¹ In broader discussions of electricity, individuals vacillated between viewing nature as both “an object of conquest” and “an ally with whom mankind was in direct dialogue.”²² As the fleshy body of a presidential figure connected with an electrically charged telegraph key (“button”), both human and machine would animate beyond the capacity of either entity alone.

Once again referring to this rhetoric of masculinity, in the words of a self-described “intelligent Englishman” who attended the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, President Cleveland “showed himself in more than the mere official sense the king of the situation” during the opening ceremony.²³ Of the same fair, the Pennsylvania School Journal noted that the button event “illustrated, as scarcely anything else could do this, the marvelous way in which the genius of man has tamed the forces of nature to his uses.”²⁴ Examples of this sort pervaded popular discourses, where authors would describe the male button presser as a kingly master and the act as constitutive of man’s control over his environment.

Quite unlike the descriptions common to US presidents, those written about presidents’ wives received a specific kind of gendered attention in press accounts of these events. Here, women’s perceived gentility, frailty, and inexperience were emphasized to stress the need for button pushing as a form of augmentation. The North American paper of Philadelphia (1886) related to readers how Mrs. Cleveland readied to push the button to start the Minneapolis Industrial Exhibition from the White House, noting that she was “comfortably attired in a white muslin dress, belted with a sash of delicate pink.” Describing the event, the article continued, “Mrs. Cleveland stepped forward to give the signal which should move the machinery more than a thousand miles away. The spectators laughed heartily when the President gravely admonished her not to start it with a jerk.”²⁵ Here, the newspaper emphasized Mrs. Cleveland’s feminine and “delicate” appearance, which served as a reinforcement of the masculine nature of the button act by mentioning President Cleveland’s admonishment. Although the president’s wife received the honor of pushing the button, she quickly became the butt of a joke for her technological incompetence.

The Atchison Daily Globe (1888) described a similar scene when former President Polk’s wife started the Cincinnati Exposition with a push. In addition to addressing the circumstances of the button-pushing event, the paper noted that Mrs. Polk “is described as a fine looking old lady, with white hair and erect, dignified carriage. Every year that she lives she becomes more notable from her connection through her husband.”²⁶ As the story continued, it interjected details of Mrs. Polk’s appearance into her involvement with the technological spectacle; presidents’ acts often garnered descriptions merely in terms of their hands and their command of the button, whereas authors put women’s bodies as a whole on display. Making hands and bodies visible for readers, news articles showed a woman at work, portraying her as relatable and domesticated while also in control.²⁷ In general, the world’s fairs often served as breeding grounds for contestations about gender and technology, a setting where women inventors fought for rights in the face of increasing discrimination.²⁸ Women button pushers were often marked by their gender and could not escape it; their femininity featured prominently as a justification for push buttons to exist in the first place. Jokes and reports on button pushing, as in the case of Mrs. Cleveland, codified both appearance and performance to demonstrate the female button pusher’s limitations. Although readers could not witness how Mrs. Cleveland pushed the button or what she looked like, the author imposed the button pusher’s gendered body on the story.

In another instance, journalists speculated that US President Cleveland would allow his baby daughter, Marion, to touch the telegraph button that would inaugurate the Atlanta Exposition. Numerous reports commented on the potential affair by drawing attention to the baby’s hands, with headlines (1895) such as “Her Dainty Touch,” which made reference to “little Maid Marian” [sic] and the tiny fingers that could set a world’s fair in motion.²⁹ Frequent references to weak, feminine hands made strong appeared in popular texts and reinforced this concept, as in the case of author “Miss Morning Glory,” who wrote in her diary of a “Japanese girl” to this effect: “I look upon my finger wondering how such an Oriental little thing can make itself potent like the mighty thumb of Mr. Edison.”³⁰ Using her finger as a marker of difference compared with Edison’s “mighty” thumb, the author drew on a stereotypical rendering of Asian culture as submissive and delicate—yet made powerful by virtue of an American electrified button.

Over the years, these opening ceremonies via a button continued prominently, and the act of a finger push stimulating the wheels of a great machine from thousands of miles away also took on a metaphorical quality in newspaper accounts. An editorial eloquently captured the button’s symbolism as a measure of the president’s efficacy in office: “The other day President McKinley touched a button in Washington and in response the huge and complicated machinery in the great exposition at Nashville—700 miles away, awakened and started into active life. That is a symbol of the President’s power if he but uses his high office in a way to convince his countrymen that he holds his place as a sacred trust and that his highest thoughts are for the welfare of the people.”³¹ The author later concluded, “We believe that in these days [President McKinley] is anxiously looking over the keyboard of the Nation and trying to select the button which will start the wheels of industry, and kindle anew the fires of hope. The button is there. God grant that he may find and touch it.”³² This striking metaphor of the president’s position of power as calculated by his ability to select the right button and manipulate the nation from a distance suggests how pushing buttons remotely took hold as a compelling way of understanding governance as a kind of machine that one could effectively stir into action at a touch. If the president could touch a telegraph key to “awaken” machinery and bring a fair to life, then he should similarly have the ability to operate a metaphorical switchboard for the country’s betterment.

As time passed, button-pushing spectacles for world’s fairs became increasingly complex to showcase the spectacle of touch creating effects at a distance. No other tele-operated event would match the one designed by fair organizers to start the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The event hinged on an ambitious scheme to have US President William McKinley and other presidents from across the Western Hemisphere touch buttons at the same time. Complicating matters, President McKinley would travel cross-country on a train while pressing his button. This elaborate performance capitalized on a fantasy of remote effects:

For those attending the exposition, these button touches—and the many mechanisms and people required to make such an arrangement possible—would have occurred far from view, making the seemingly spontaneous animation of machinery all the more spectacular. Newspaper reports on the coordinated spectacle called this a “novel” and “remarkable” plan, emphasizing how rulers and nations could come together through the use of technology to demonstrate their combined power. This striking example of collaborative work across great distances—where cable companies, telegraphic companies, and locomotive engineers merged around a common purpose—received voluminous praise across journalistic accounts for its efforts to coordinate action from a distance. Whether riding on a train, sitting in the White House, or standing on a fair’s podium, a world leader could set his finger on the button and bring an event to life, these sources noted, pointing to a kind of omnipotence once unimaginable.

Just as media stories could act as sutures between a button-pressing event and a fair event, they could also work to expose the proceedings as artificial—and inauthentic—when a president didn’t actually control the technology. In most cases, fair organizers would have wires strung from the White House to the fairgrounds so that telegraph and machinery were directly connected, but in the case of the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, President Roosevelt only sent a signal and an indirect one at that. The Boston Daily reported on this faked performance in an article titled, “Not by President,” in which the author described a plot by the fair’s president, David R. Francis, to simulate the button act: “President Roosevelt had telegraphed Pres [sic] Francis earlier that he had important engagements that would call him away from the White House chamber shortly after 1 and that he would be compelled to touch the button soon after 1,” the author noted. “Pres Francis on receiving this looked worried. ... When President Roosevelt’s message was received to start the machinery and the cascades, Francis ignored it till Taft had made his address. He then pretended to receive the signal and the machinery and waterfalls were started while the flags burst forth from the exhibit palaces. No one in the crowd was the wiser.”³⁴ While fair organizers worked on the ground to keep the spectacle intact—taking advantage of the president’s remoteness—reporters offered an exposé on the actual, fabricated goings on between fair organizers and the president. Although media accounts often reinforced dominant narratives of presidential control and national pride, they could also provide insight into the more mischievous and inauthentic sides of the function by acting in a watchdog capacity. Although the long-distance event could succeed on the ground, journalists intervened by weighing in on the act’s authenticity for readers.

While these widely discussed and attended celebrations of push-button effects occurred on a national stage, hobbyists and young experiments played with buttons that promised a thrill while discreetly hiding away the source of control. Myriad catalogs and magazines advertised novelties for purchase that would offer their users inexpensive opportunities to explore electrical effects. Chief among these included toys for practical jokes and pranks that took advantage of unwitting spectators and participants, providing a shocking—both surprising and painful—form of interaction. As with other kinds of lessons about push buttons, advertisers often targeted these novelties at boys—in contrast to how girls became showpieces for effortlessness—and framed them as opportunities for thrilling amusement. Their affordable price and accessibility to a wide range of consumers made these practical jokes one of the earliest sources of experimentation with push buttons for laypersons.

Indeed, the Sentinel newspaper of Milwaukee (1887) defined a “practical joker” as “the fellow who has a rubber nail in his office to hang coats on, a dummy electric button with a needle to call for a messenger; who coats the gum of his envelopes with red pepper, and who tells you he can buy thirteen two-cent stamps for a cent and a quarter.”³⁵ In this description, the paper attributed both harmless pranks (rubber coat hanger) and painful encounters (needle masquerading as electric button) to the practical joker; across the board, the performer occupied a position of power by controlling those not privy to the joke and demonstrating his mastery over electricity.

One of the most common electric button jokes played on two technologies with which many people would already have familiarity—the chestnut bell and the electric bell. The former, a bell worn on a waistcoat and rung in mocking whenever someone told a story or bad joke one too many times, provided an increasingly cruel and sophisticated form of entertainment when combined with electricity: “When you have one on, and someone tells you that your favorite story is a chestnut, you suavely tell him to ring it up for you,” the San Francisco Evening Bulletin instructed readers about the electric chestnut button. The article recommended, “As soon as he presses the chestnut button a needle point runs into his finger and announces that the laugh is on him.”³⁶ A New Jersey catalog for electrical novelties and other supplies similarly promised that the electric button, sold for 10 cents, was “Just the thing to use on old chestnut stale-joke peddlers. One shock from the Electric Button and he will never try to ‘rim off’ any chestnuts on you again, but he will immediately send for a button himself, and square his account with some other fellow” (italics original).³⁷ Producers sold the electric chestnut button as a playful “improvement” on a popular gag while reinforcing the notion that the button’s owner could employ the novelty to serve a disciplinary function that warded against unfunny jokes. One shock, advertisers encouraged, would dissuade the use of these jokes and enable the former victim to take his own revenge on the next unsuspecting participant.³⁸ This pay-it-forward push certainly promoted tomfoolery and amusement with electricity, but it also lent an incredible aura of power to push buttons by making them impenetrably opaque and surprising. A seemingly safe and simple push of a button—whose design meant that pushes did not get any feedback or instruction before touching—could at once become the trigger for humiliation and physical pain on the part of the unwitting pusher. Like the familiar chestnut bell, novelty versions of electric doorbells were made for purchasers to wear on their clothing. These toys made fools of the curious, trusting spectator who possessed an interest in new gadgets while playing on the psychology that anyone offered a button would press it. An ad (1887) offered “The Electric Button” for 15 cents, a device that “looks very tempting, and attracts the curiosity to PUSH it, which never fails to produce a shock that will make them dance.”³⁹

Another form of push-button electric magic designed for purchase involved a button-activated electric light for wearing on scarves, neckties, and lapels. The Stout-Meadowcraft Company of New York (1885) began advertising the “electric light scarf pin” for $5.00. The pin operated by affixing a lamp to one’s clothing that, when connected to a silk-covered cord, battery, and a push button hidden in a pocket, could bring a spark of electricity to common attire (see figure 4.3). The company promised potential consumers that “the most sensational and amusing effects may be produced by this scarf pin, bewildering and surprising those who are not in on the secret, as there is nothing apparent which would indicate the manner of producing the light.”⁴⁰ More than the spectacle of wearing an electric light on one’s clothing, the advertisement emphasized the device’s secret method of control—of concealing the button beneath one’s clothing—as the intriguing and surprising element of the electrical adornment. By creating distance between action and effect, the novelty promoted push buttons as conveying mediums for producing electricity at will and with simple convenience. Users did not even need to see the switch to operate it.

Over time, the price of this electrical novelty had greatly decreased, and Ohio Electric Works of Cleveland (1897) lauded the invention for its evolution in an advertisement: “An idea of the wonderful progress in electrical science is well demonstrated in the perfection of this necktie light,” the company boasted. “But a few years ago it was considered wonderful when an electric light of any efficiency was produced, even by costly and cumbersome machinery; now we use it to adorn the person and generate electricity in the vest pocket by an instrument cheaper and more reliable than a watch.”⁴¹ The ad also noted that consumers could purchase these lights in any color, clear crystal, or opal, which “appears like a ‘ball of fire.’”

The new-and-improved scarf pin light at the end of the nineteenth century, worn primarily by boys and men (according to the ad), exemplified strides made in the areas of electrical control. Comparing the light to a commonly accessible watch, Ohio Electric Works sold a vision of adornment with electricity easily put into the hands of its user. The “novel” button in a breast pocket, tucked safely away from the site of the spectacle, could give rise to a brilliant “ball of fire” sure to impress neophytes unfamiliar with the particularities of electrical mechanisms. The same company also offered a pricey $3 version of its light for a necktie or coat, proclaiming its popular use among “actors, watchmen, mail carriers, messengers, milkmen, and others.” More than a frivolous amusement, the light served a practical function of lighting one’s way in occupations typically characterized by nighttime work or in other places with darkness.⁴²

Other instructions for a host of remote electrical curiosities made possible by button pushing circulated in tomes such as R. A. R. Bennett’s How to Make Electrical Machines (1902), which offered elaborate designs for boys to create a doll that could play an electric trumpet without human hands ever interfering. Wrote Bennett of this novelty: “Hide the battery in a corner in a black box, the wires coming through the side next the wall, and the press in a dark corner, or on the floor under a table so that you can put your foot on it while your hands are free, writing, etc. You can of course now tell the doll to blow, at the same moment putting your foot on the press, when the trumpet blows accordingly.”⁴³ The author noted that, much to the inventor’s delight, “Of course this is mysterious to the last degree to the uninitiated friend to whom you are displaying the doll, as you may be any distance off from the doll with your hands free, speaking to him across the room.”⁴⁴ This description emphasized, like the electric button shock novelty, how to fool the “uninitiated” spectator by separating electrical act from human body. By stepping on a button situated across the room, a seemingly inanimate doll could come to life and blow a horn without any evidence of the button presser’s involvement. These push-button acts offered opportunities to explore and engage with electricity in ways that made the intangible seemingly tangible and the effect far more dramatic than the mere touch that caused it.

Take an ad for an electric money bank, for example, which offered elaborate instructions on how to fool a well-meaning patron who wished to contribute money to a child’s bank: “When company comes to the house bring out the Bank and they will read the words on the top and drop a penny in it every time, and when they push the Button, you will see some pretty lively Dancing right away,” the piece instructed. Promoting the fun of surprise and bodily stimulation, the ad concluded, “The dancing will be done by the one who pushes the button, as they will receive a shock that they will not forget very soon.”⁴⁵

The advertisement emphasized how the toy bank, once a neutral object that its owner could show off to visitors, transformed into the conveyor of an electrical (and supposedly unforgettable) performance. A button stood at the center of this experience; one could not turn back from “dancing” once initiating a push (see figure 4.4). Experiments with giving and getting electric shocks were numerous during this time period, and well-known gags such as the “electric girl” at the county fair whose hand would dispense a shock from her body when touched while “defeat[ing] enquiry” played on the dramatization of secrecy, magic, and sensory experience.⁴⁶ Author George M. Hopkins went so far as to proclaim in his book, Home Mechanics for Amateurs (1903), that “the giving of electric shocks to one’s friends is always a pleasant pastime,” encouraging young experimenters to literally take electricity into their own hands.⁴⁷ Children’s pranks, in the context of domestic environments and on streets, offered initiation for youth into a culture of scientific wonderment and exploration, where the child could have control over the unschooled and unfamiliar adult.

Not only did push-button mischief play with the dangerous, surprising, and concealed nature of electricity, but these pranks also fit contextually within the late nineteenth-century, which has been described as an “age of puns, parodies, quips, hoaxes ... practical jokes.”⁴⁸ Men—called “jolly fellows”—were typically responsible for this kind of carousing and humor, celebrating masculinity and even violence as part of their repertoire.

When it came to users’ feelings about the potency of fingers pushing buttons to generate effects across distance, opinions existed at both ends of the spectrum, either attributing a tremendous sense of power to hands or describing them as largely impotent. Poet and philosopher George Woodward Warder (1901) believed that “[God] touched the electric button that gave impulse to all atoms, created all suns, evolved all worlds, and sent them singing in harmonious motion through all space, for all eternities.”⁴⁹ In religious discourses, the “finger of god” had long featured prominently, associating hands with creation as well as destruction. For, according to one sermon, “We are under [God’s] eye and his finger; and one look of that eye could blast us, one touch of that finger could crush us.”⁵⁰ The cause-and-effect and all-or-nothing functions of push buttons further facilitated such a view of whole worlds brought into being or exterminated with a push. In this regard, button pushers’ fingers functioned in a forceful and godlike manner, and with agency.

Thinking through this relationship between button pushers and the effects of their pushes, one writer similarly drew on religious rhetoric: “Deeds of grandeur or deeds of terror are accomplished with less immediate effort, and at a distance from their effect. The touch of a button executes a murderer or starts all the enginery of the Columbian Exposition. Is not this somewhat the way that God works?”⁵¹ This capacity to spur people and machines into action at a far remove seemed to promise the best of the electrical age: liveness, connectivity, visibility, safety, spectacle, or even the power of a god. Writers who perceived button pushers as godlike imagined that touch could have a great ripple effect across the country or even the world, and this form of remote control inspired an unrelenting pursuit of digital command in the name of humans’ taming of electrical forces.

Yet another writer described the “spiritual” experience of distant effects through electricity. Author Gerald Stanley Lee (1901) argued to this effect in an ode to machines that, “Every time [man] touches a material thing, in proportion as he touches it mightily he brings out inner light in it. He spiritualizes it.” He proposed, for example, that a man of the Industrial Age, rather than using a door knocker of the past, “likes it better, by touching a button, to have a door-bell rung for him by a couple of metals down in his cellar chewing each other. He likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs with a thrill on a wire and open his front door.”⁵² He described how someone could figuratively “reach” through wires, once again connecting the value of reachability to this form of digital command made possible by push-button electrical control.⁵³

One striking case of thinking about this potency of reach and distant effects involved applying the bell-ringing metaphor to medicine; physicians often made the argument that parts of the body worked like buttons, where a push in one place could stir up effects in another. For author Emma Curtis Hopkins (1894), thoughts in the brain represented touches of a button that would “ring” throughout the mind and body; bad or “discordant” thoughts would send that body into disorder.⁵⁴ For another author, the whole sympathetic nervous system was made up of “thousands of little electric buttons” and “innumerable switch-boards” that communicated with one another (see figure 4.5).⁵⁵ Yet another suggested that digestion might fail if the push button were broken, whereas a functional button would send messages from the reflex center to one’s nerves.⁵⁶ Physician George William Winterburn (1900) concluded that disease compared to the mechanism of an electric bell, in which “pressure on the push-button closes the circuit” and caused bacteria to circulate.⁵⁷ Similarly, Andrew Taylor Still (1910) theorized that life came from touching a button that would cause one’s heart to beat and to generate electricity throughout the body.⁵⁸ Over and over again, medical professionals used push-button analogies not only because they made for attractive images and mental models in sync with electrification efforts of the time period, but also because they referenced an everyday, relatable technical object that epitomized communication and control through straightforward cause and effect. Buttons represented how a single touch in one location could rapidly travel across distance with tangible and often profound results in a kind of domino effect.

In perhaps the most significant instance of button as metaphor for distant effects, in a widely cited article about female circumcision, Dr. Robert T. Morris (1892) proclaimed famously to the medical world that, “The clitoris is a little electric button which, pressed by adhesions, rings up the whole nervous system.”⁵⁹ The doctor proposed that this malfunctioning “button,” which could control a vast network of physical symptoms and effects (ranging from epilepsy to nervous disorders) from a distance, must be treated to restore a woman’s out-of-control system back to health. This call for female circumcision attracted much discussion within the gynecological and obstetrics community, with many voicing support for Morris’s conclusion.⁶⁰ As a vivid metaphor for the way that women’s bodies worked (or how some believed they worked), the electric button construct served to demonstrate how the medical establishment could control feminine anatomy and women more generally by viewing them as machines set into motion by a single touch; this approach fit within broader mainstream societal efforts to medicalize women’s sexual arousal and label it as a “crisis of illness.”⁶¹ This crisis manifested from, in the words of physician Benjamin E. Dawson, who supported Morris’s conclusion, the “electric push button, which from irritation it may ring up disastrous reflexes in remote parts of the body or transform a healthy sexuality into a jangling sensuality.”⁶² An “out-of-order” push button created a condition that required physicians’ interventions.

Without question, individuals employed metaphors of the body as a machine well before Morris and continued to do so afterward.⁶³ The fact that the doctor chose an electric button as his metaphor and that this metaphor perpetuated, however, suggests specifically how physicians imagined women’s bodies as controllable and buttons as dangerous sources of activation. It also demonstrated a close interrelation among femininity, mere touch, and push buttons. The image of a button conjured a cultural association of swift action and reaction, of potent yet simple electrical control, and the speed and intensity of this control with a single touch. Just as important, it identified a power differential between button pusher and the “pushed” that allowed for easily justified domination. Doctors strove to fix the “button” so they could restore balance to the body to maintain social control. Women thus existed in a kind of limbo position as desiring subjects—at once made into spectacles as ideal consumers of pleasure—and yet demonized for their sexual desire. The push-button metaphor of women’s sexual organs paved the way for future thinking about buttons in relation to sexuality, referring commonly to “turning someone on” by pushing her buttons.

The sexual effect metaphor of the clitoris described buttons as the harbingers of disastrous or undesirable effects, which required controlling or eliminating the button. When it came to electricity, seemingly unstoppable and instantaneous results swiftly rendered also produced anxiety. Although push-button bells typically worked by momentary action—they only rang when a finger stayed on the button and stopped when the finger lifted—what of other buttons that might start but never stop? How to make sense, for example, of future prophecies of doomsday buttons? Could a button pusher, unable or unwilling to turn back, end the whole world at a touch? When button pushes were perceived as irrevocable and dangerous, carrying out action at a far remove from the finger that animated them, their utility and social significance took on a different tenor.

Indeed, as early as 1892—more than 50 years before the political anxieties generated by the push-button warfare of the Cold War era—pushing buttons came to symbolize a fear of long-distance, instantaneous warfare. Although push-button warfare existed only in popular imagination as portents of a future where button pushing could end the lives of everyone in a country, or even the world, in these prophecies, an all-powerful button pusher could enact swift, irreparable effects with a single press by setting unstoppable forces in motion. In an article titled “The End of War,” author J. F. Sullivan envisioned a world where “war seemed to grow ever more terrible; until it came to such a pass that a single human being could destroy a whole nation by simply pressing a small button with his finger” (see figure 4.6).⁶⁴ As Sullivan imagined, it was not a crazed dictator or power-hungry politician who blew up the world, but rather a bumbling gentleman who unwittingly and effortlessly pushed a button that he happened to encounter without realizing what effects the button would trigger. This extreme case—holding an entire nation’s fate in one’s hand (or rather at the touch of one’s finger)—brought into question views about power, control, communication, and effortless machine interventions. At the same time, it suggested that buttons were too simple and swift in action without checks and balances in place to prevent the ignorant button pusher from bringing about ruin. The reachability enabled by digital command also produced anxiety—if anyone could gain access to a push button, how could society maintain control over the unskilled, incompetent, or evil-doing controller?

To this end, because of buttons’ simplicity and the way they initiated cause and effect, fiction writers also viewed them as the mechanism that could trigger an apocalyptic ending for humanity if buttons fell into the wrong hands. One author imagined a scenario in which Thomas Edison stood at the apex of a conflict between Great Britain and the United States, possessing the electric power to eradicate whole countries from the map: “In order to avert future trouble,” the fictional Edison proclaimed, “I think it would be best to destroy England altogether.”⁶⁵ After instructing his assistant to touch button number four, which obliterated the country, Edison concluded, “If we should ever be at war with any other nation, you have only to notify me. I have an electric button connecting with every foreign country which will destroy it when pressed. In ten minutes I could destroy every country in the world, the United States included.”⁶⁶ This bleak portrait of Edison as an all-too-powerful scientist at a switchboard of buttons controlling the world spoke to the antibutton contingent’s greatest fears. In such a scenario, with decision making localized in one person’s hands and the ability to change the course of human history with so little effort, this writer and others imagined the push button at the center of the race’s ruin.⁶⁷ Buttons conjured fears of all-or-nothing actions that could spiral out of control. Although this kind of catastrophic war did not exist at that moment, depictions of it presciently foretold the paranoia that would accompany a world where geopolitics rested on a push or press at the hands of a digital commander. Moral watchdogs frequently spoke out about this kind of warfare, whether malicious or unintentional.

Pushing a button to blow up a mine, start world’s fair machinery, or initiate warfare each constituted an example of buttons as tools of activation. Thinking about pushing a button to set these forces into motion meant to confront an essential paradox, according to scientist Julius Robert Mayer:

Where pushing a button certainly connoted effortless control, Mayer identified a theme common to the volatile nature of button pushing as a reversal of forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the forceless force of a finger touch combined with a catastrophic or far-reaching effect could carry with it grave and sometimes irreparable—whether imagined or not—consequences. In part, this viewpoint reflected a discomfort with carrying out an action that triggered results which couldn’t be viewed by the button pusher. Scholar and author George Herbert Palmer (1903) wrote to this effect, “When I touch a button, great ships are loaded on the opposite side of the earth and cross the intervening oceans to work the bidding of a person they have never seen.”⁶⁹ Where users perceived buttons as erasing distance in some circumstances, they viewed them as perpetuators of distance in others.

Social debates routinely occurred about the morality of technological interventions from a distance: what ethical guidelines should one take into account when pressing a button thousands of miles away that could take the life of someone else? Should matters of life and death take place only in face-to-face contexts? Dr. A. R. Wallace (1895), writing on examples of immorality and morality both hypothetical and real, concluded bleakly about the human condition that nothing “would restrain a poor, selfish, and naturally unsympathetic man from pressing the electric button which would at once destroy an unknown millionaire and make the agent of his destruction the honoured inheritor of his wealth.”⁷⁰ Wallace believed that in times of desperation, anyone would hide behind the push button’s shelter of anonymity and take the life of another for his own gain. Here, push buttons acted as simplistic vehicles for getting away with murder. Onlookers feared that localizing control to an instant, decisive, and remote touch—made possible by the invisibility of the effects—would provoke humanity’s darkest impulses.⁷¹

These fears, although grandiose in their description, were founded in material changes occurring in military technology. Of note, those observing increasingly mechanical warfare described a moral as well as a manual shift in the physical act of carrying out war. According to Charles Morris (1898), “A modern battle-ship has grown to be an automatic machine, an instrument of warfare in which nothing is done by hand.”⁷² He remarked, “Now the hand has little to do, except to move levers, press electric buttons, open and close throttles, and the like.”⁷³ Echoing sentiments common across industries, Morris contrasted manual labor from digital command—the minimalist intervention of hands pressing buttons seemed not to qualify as hand work, despite the fact that all of these controls would have necessitated routine gestures and adjustments to keep the battleship functioning appropriately.

This problem of the hand having “little to do” produced concern—and even outright indignation—in the late nineteenth century, when it came to matters of life and death. In particular, debates over the electric death penalty demonstrated a fundamental uneasiness with taking a life in a manner quite “‘insulated’ and at a remove from the body in question. In an essay on “Electric Killing” (1888), Thos. D. Lockwood noted that, although electricity could allow people to communicate in myriad ways, “we have not yet pressed a key or a push-button for the deliberate purpose of killing anybody.”⁷⁴ Lockwood wrote in response to a suggestion made in New York, outlined in a report from the Gerry Commission to begin using electricity for the death penalty, and he called this a “cold blooded proposition for the degradation of a noble science; and moreover one which is entirely uncalled for.”⁷⁵ Electricians convening at the National Electric Light Association Convention in the following year expressed similar concerns in a panel assessing the constitutionality of electrical capital punishment. Vocal dissenter Professor Anthony argued that no sheriff would want to “place the electrodes and touch the button which was to produce death.”⁷⁶ He wagered that even after 100 years, electricians or other experts would still have to carry out the act because no nonexpert would take on such a weighty responsibility. Despite these outspoken rejoinders, only five months later, New York passed the Electric Execution Act, which conjectured that applying a scientific and technological method to executions would reduce public outrage toward capital punishment.⁷⁷ Given the “gentle pressure on the button” required to carry out executions, some also viewed the shift as a progression to “moral and intellectual rather than physical” ground, quite unlike hanging, stoning, beheading, or other more viscerally violent methods.⁷⁸ Public interest in the death penalty crystallized around this modern, technologically superior and masterful form of control that could take a life.⁷⁹ Push buttons combined with the electric chair to create a standardized, state-sanctioned form of justice that was “instantaneous” and “well calculated to inspire terror.”⁸⁰

Removing labor from the operation via electric button provided a useful justification for managing deviant behavior while making the activity less overtly gruesome and brutal. Yet some worried that people did not know enough about electricity to use it effectively for execution, nor should the criminal “be put out of the way in the easiest possible manner for him.”⁸¹ Death penalty by button could be perceived as too simplistic and therefore unfit for its weighty task, given that it operated with the same touch as an electric bell push; from this perspective, a “reversal of forces” violated a tenet that human life should not be taken without effort.⁸² The binary nature of electric death—life and death tethered to a switch—also produced mixed reactions. Describing how prisons would carry out electrical executions, Thomas Edison—who originally opposed the death penalty before taking a financial interest in the process—relied on the push button as the key mechanism in carrying out the deed.⁸³ Edison famously remarked of this process, “When the time comes, touch a button, close the circuit, and,” he said with a snap of his fingers, “it is over.”⁸⁴

In reality, however, early forays into electrical executions often did not conform to the on/off binary that Edison and others promised. The first execution by electric chair—of prisoner William Kemmler—produced disastrous results when 17 seconds of applied electric current did not take the man’s life as expected. According to a New York Times (1891) article reporting on a subsequent death penalty case that would use the same method, the electricians responsible for the failure “have not forgotten that life apparently came back to Kemmler after it was thought that he was dead and the current was turned off.”⁸⁵ Far from the “snap” that could toggle between life and death, the realities of electrical capital punishment suggested that execution by button required an array of technical forces to come together successfully. In the ensuing years, push-button executions evolved into routine practice, viewed by many as a more humane way of killing than those of the past. By transforming violent physical actions into mere touch, push buttons stripped physical force from the death penalty act while leaving the forceful impact of death in its wake.

Although buttons sometimes functioned differently from how they were imagined in electrical execution, many continued to invest in the notion that buttons could provide instantaneous and direct retribution for those wronged, balancing out the scales of good and evil. The Washington Post (1892) indeed reported that a father, after the death of his daughter, hoped that “I may be allowed to touch the button of the electric machine that kills the man that murdered my daughter.”⁸⁶ Putting control in the hands of the victim, the push button could serve as a tool of empowerment, but it also raised societal concerns about what it meant to take a life with a single push. Those who advocated against button pushing believed human life was too sacred to take so easily. Pushing buttons prompted deep and sometimes unanswerable questions about society’s impulse to carry out life-and-death decisions from a distance, to put control within one person’s hands and under one person’s finger.

Given the wide array of interpretations about generating push-button effects at a distance, it became difficult to pin down whether buttons were purveyors of pleasure, panic, or some strange mixture of both emotions. Just as a society in the midst of industrialization and electrification had to negotiate what it meant to communicate at longer distances through technologies such as telegraphs and telephones, so too did the question of action at a distance prompt negotiation over what forces button pushers might set into motion. Where setting people into motion could provoke frustration, when it came to electricity, this kind of activation often led to anxiety.

Notes