I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on Halloween displays. The thing that scared people the most was a big red button I encouraged them to press. My plan was to give the first person who pressed it all of our candy and a cash prize. No one ever did.
This is brilliant. tbh, I too, would probably be hesitant to push the History Eraser Button without a case of Space Madness .
When the push button was new, people were freaked
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Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#92> 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.
In china, those children can give their parents smartphones and other electronics :)
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I'm of 20th C. origin—not 19th—and the first electrical things I played with as a young kid were electric bells, buzzers, batteries, flashlight globes and reels of bell wire—lots and lots of it. (Experimenting with such items wasn't an unfashionable activity when I was a kid.) Bell wire, which usually came in the form of two single-stranded copper wires twisted loosely together and insulated in red and white PV…
> Well, I'm of 20th C. origin—not 19th This already is a massive difference. Large majority of children in the 19th century did not have any access to electricity, let alone knowing how to fashion an electric bell.
Broadly, the reason for why some 20th C. kids would have had access to less information is that they were more protected from dangers than those in 19th C. (and in some ways that's problematic when it comes to learning). Also, clearly, the types of information available in each era would have been different—and this difference would have been accentuated depending on which part of each century we're referring to.
The 19th C.—being the height of the Industrial Revolution—change came thick and fast, so it's almost superfluous to say kids' knowledge of electricity at the turn of the 20th C. would have been much greater than at the beginning of the 19th however this difference wasn't anywhere near as stark at other times throughout the 19th C.
This is best illustrated by example and for that I'll use a book published in 1858 by Elisha Noyce titled The Boys Book of Industrial Information. https://archive.org/details/boysbookofindust00noyc
So by 1858 enough information was known about electricity to include technical aspects about it including its industrial applications such as electroplating, p129, and the telegraph, pp273-280 in a kids' book. I'd also posit that some 20 years later (by say 1880) with the coming together of electrical engineering—telephone, electric motors, generators, transatlantic cables, theory by Maxwell, Wheatstone et al, that much more information about the subject would have been available to kids.
Noyce's book was a true eye-opener to me when I came across it some two to three decades ago, so much so that I now truly regret not having a copy of it as a kid. I know I would have gained a great amount of useful knowledge from it despite the fact that it was published a century before my time.
Whilst I had access to more modern texts they didn't provide the information in such a useful and meaningful way. Moreover, much of that information is still very relevant and valuable today. For instance, I refer you to pp57-58 on the dangers of lead and lead poisoning, therein Noyce issues a stark warning especially so with respect to white lead as used in paint.
(This advice would have been invaluable to boys who would have gone into industries where they'd be exposed to such dangers. It also infomes us that knowledge of and concerns about bad and dangerous working conditions of the era may have been better understood at the time than some modern history books would have us believe.)
Keep in mind this warning was in a book for boys written to provide them with practical and useful information—not published in some erudite scientific publication. The fact that by 1858 the dangers of lead had filtered down not only to ordinary people but also to their kids makes the failure of governments and those knowledgeable of the facts to act in a decisive way over the forthcoming century all the more tragic (when I first read Noyce's warning I was quite horrified that so little action had been taken until recent decades).
As you see, with actual information to hand things seem a little more nuanced.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article points out.
Yes, but in my opinion, much of the mental exercise in the article and the book is based on how the electric push button was an entirely new concept.
The new concept was power amplification: a small effort causing a larger than "natural" effect.
E.g. you were always able to press a button to tinkle a bell, but pressing a button and obtaining a sustained electrical ringing was new.
Valves and transistors took it to the present stage, by cascading the effect of small inputs switching larger amounts of power from an external supply.
(Yes, power amplification could be done mechanically before electricity with energy from water, weights, etc. but it was too cumbersome.)
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#95> 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.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#96> 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.
An inspector refused to come look at our house because there is a power line near it. People are still afraid of electricity. It's funny because he probably uses a cell phone, drives a car, lives in his own house, uses a microwave, owns a computer, all situations in which ghasp electricity is close to his body! We're just glad we didn't actually hire him.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#97From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?
If one is to read Wikipedia and repeat it verbatim without understanding then one is only a single component of a greater transportation medium. But if in contrast, if one was to internalise those words and draw lines of inference between ideas so elusively captured therein and a wider base of knowledge then maybe you are something more.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I'm of 20th C. origin—not 19th—and the first electrical things I played with as a young kid were electric bells, buzzers, batteries, flashlight globes and reels of bell wire—lots and lots of it. (Experimenting with such items wasn't an unfashionable activity when I was a kid.) Bell wire, which usually came in the form of two single-stranded copper wires twisted loosely together and insulated in red and white PV…
Living in Europe, I’m one of the rare millionaires so I have a house, 150m2 (on the Côte d’Azur, I admit it’s expensive), but even for me, thinking of “a bell for mother to signal us to come to dinner” is the thing that belong to the times when energy was unlimited, and therefore house sizes and taxes on inhabitable square meters. It’s not that we do have bells here, but we don’t have the square meters anymore.
I well understand what you say having lived in a crowded part of Europe for a time. It made me all the more appreciative of the fact that I grew up in a big home with a large front and back yard and that our house was only a few hundred metres from bushland.
Nevertheless, in some ways I envy you living in the Côte d’Azur. That is one of my most favorite parts of Europe.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#99The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by anticipation of things like:
- Disconnect of people from nature an each other.
- Replacement of real things with simulacra, which then begins to be perceived as the real thing.
- Mounting, yet fragile complexity of systems people interact with (initially) and within (eventually).
Looking at our society today, it's pretty clear that none of these fears were irrational.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree that bouton can mean pimple or zit, it's the rest of the phrase that I don't understand. Bouton doesn't mean projection, and sure isn't a verb...
Note that the English word was derived from Old French, not Modern French. And Old French noun boton/bouton (”bud”) is itself formed from the Old French verb boter/bouter , “to thrust.” It’s had a variety of meanings in French generally related to ”thing that pushes out.” Google Translate is not a very complete dictionary. You can find many more definitions in Trésor de la langue française informatisé : https://www.c…