Power Button by Rachel Plotnick

Author:Rachel Plotnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hands; touch; digital; machines; electricity; nineteenth century; labor history; tinkering; servants; elevators; instant gratification
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2018-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

This suggestion well preceded a formal human factors movement, but it recommended practices common to that field by suggesting that homeowners could simulate the push-button gesture repeatedly to devise the most ergonomic and intuitive arrangement that would minimize bodily effort. In general, according to one homeowner, “When you are dealing with switches it isn’t a game of ‘button, button, who’s got the button’ if you really want to avoid inconvenience in finding your switches. They should be placed where strangers, even, can quickly find them.”50

Yet the problem of putting buttons “within reach” arose once more, as it did in so many spheres of life. For example, housewives familiar with early forms of electricity often warned that push-button switches in young boys’ hands would lead only to troublemaking; thus, they discouraged youths’ experimentation with and access to buttons. In her 1891 book Decorative Electricity, J. E. H. Gordon, an electrical engineer’s wife, wrote, “The switches should be placed high in the nursery and school-room, and strict rules should be made that the children do not meddle with them, as they will climb on chairs and footstools, and electric switches, as I have found from personal experience, are perfectly irresistible to little boys.”51 Although children were often encouraged to learn about buttons and incorporate them into their understanding of the world, many believed that the psychological appeal of the switch would prove too great to resist for a young hand. Those with a bit of forethought therefore planned to make control inaccessible at the outset of wiring homes, buildings, and other devices. Just as electricians might cover up wires so they would remain out of sight, wiring manuals suggested that electricians should install switches between 3 feet 10 inches and 4 feet above the floor to be “out of reach of small persons (children), who would perhaps make toys out of them.”52 Do-it-yourself articles often included suggestions to mitigate inappropriate touches, as in the case of automobile manufacturers that devised ways to lock up lighting switches from children fooling around.53 They could guard against “many small boys [who] take pleasure in unscrewing covers from electric push buttons” and received attention in forums like Popular Mechanics magazine so that tinkerers and amateur electricians could institute precautionary measures inexpensively.54

Beyond keeping children in line, creating conditions for pushing buttons the “right” way involved managing buttons themselves and developing a set of protocols for appropriate touching in particular situations. In fact, as with efforts made by homeowners to manage how servants used electric bells and responded to calls, employers similarly limited how their staff could make use of light switches. Housekeepers often possessed a master switch in their bedrooms that would control the lights in younger maids’ rooms in the morning and at night. Those servants who did have access to the switch might receive routine reminders to turn off the lights when leaving a room to keep costs down.55 Homeowners might also install buttons with timers to manage when servants could push them, thereby avoiding

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