Behold... Abstraction!
When the push button was new, people were freaked
11–20 of 189 posts
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#12> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.
Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going in the right direction.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#13Fascinating. There’s always a loss of lower-level knowledge when we introduce abstractions. Yet “we stand upon the shoulders of giants,” it’s the layers of abstractions underneath us that we don’t have to understand or even think about that free our minds to compose ever more amazing technology on top. Still, progression from the layer that you know and love to the next that paves over it is bittersweet.
>we don’t have to understand or even think about
But also don't have to make all the same mistakes other folks did / toil our way through to the ... potentially same endpoint. At least as far as code goes I've gone through plenty of experiments that go:
"Man I don't need this complex chunk of software, let me just try ..."
"Ok now I understand why that chunk of software is the way it is... and it's better than mine... I'll use that."
Good learning experience! But do that enough and you just spin your wheels endlessly.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#14This sounds trivially correct but the short article doesn't do enough to support it other than the few anecdotes that are mentioned. This is similar to today when, as an example, the NYT tries to get in front of a trend by highlighting and cherry picking a few examples of people who are doing what one of their articles purports in so many words is more widespread than it really might be.
Then take a statement like this:
"many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick"
What does 'many people' exactly mean? Nothing at all you wouldn't say 'many people got sick from the pandemic' you'd back it up with some type of figure or number.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#15Rachel Plotnick's book (Power Button, referenced in the article) is very good. Here's a much longer excerpt from it, on the button as it relates to carrying out life-and-death decisions (e.g., warfare and executions): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-war-and-electric-death...
(Full disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who published Power Button. But it really is one of my favorite history of tech titles we've published in the 10+ years i've been here)
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#16> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. "Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th century children.
And is probably as applicable to a geeky subset of 21st century children.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#17Poppycock.
The concept of mechanical push (and pull) buttons have been long present in locks and alarm triggers long before electricity was introduced to general public.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#18Poppycock. The concept of mechanical push (and pull) buttons have been long present in locks and alarm triggers long before electricity was introduced to general public.
As the article points out.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#19Plus you were never sure you wouldn’t receive an electric shock!
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#20> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. "Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th century children.
I also strongly suspect the number of people who were freaked out by buttons in the 19th century is approximately in that "some" range.
Mistrusting electricity is a different story, but that's not the title of the article.