Touch of a Button: Long-Distance Transmission, Communication, and Control at World's Fairs

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opening ceremonies of world's fairs were routinely consummated with a “touch of a button” on an ordinary telegraph. Yet in a striking shift from co-located events, United States presidents began triggering these ceremonies, as well as machines, fountains, and fairground lights, from a distance in early experiments with teleoperation. This article interrogates how media discourses framed and interpreted long-distance acts for readers, with particular emphasis on how these narratives imagined touch was transmitted—and communicated—through wires. It calls first for increased scholarly attention to the ways that bodies assert themselves through acts of long-distance connectivity, past and present; and second, for the creation of a robust cultural history that examines precursors to teleoperation and telepresence within the broader historiography of communication and media.

Keywords:

• Button
• Control
• Distance
• Touch
• World's Fair

Introduction

President Grover Cleveland touched a golden button at Buzzard's Bay late this afternoon, and instantly the wheels of the machinery … 1,000 miles away, leaped into life. Cannons blazed and thundered, 60,000 people cheered, a thousand flags fluttered from the tops of the many buildings, and the South's great industrial exposition was opened. (Williams & Kennedy, 1896)

That familiar feat of long-distance button pressing is now passé. It was sufficient to excite the wonder of the nineties; but these are different days. (“Untitled,” 1933).

For a brief few decades at the turn of the twentieth century, “long-distance button-pressing events” garnered intense media attention. The image of a U.S. president, stationed at the White House or his summer home, pressing a small telegraph key (typically called a button) and igniting machinery across the country made for the kind of spectacle reporters craved. Yet, beyond its effectiveness as a technological marvel, “the button story” in media discourses came to represent a deeper social desire for and anxiety over instant control from a distance well before the realities of nuclear war, telework, or the internet. Although individuals had used the telegraph as a communication device for many years, world's fairs and expositions beginning in the late 1800s facilitated new appropriations of the technology as a kind of early remote control, marking a transition from co-located to long-distance events. This article examines the spaces of popular newspapers and magazines in order to understand how historical actors viewed the telegraph as a transmitter not only of messages, but also of presidents’ physical actions (such as starting a machine or triggering flags to wave)—communicating political power and the potency of technological touch through the wires. In the following pages, I unpack media discourses and their profound role as pedagogical tools for readers who most likely would never witness the button act in person.

Button-pressing events occurred in a compelling historical moment when the introduction of electricity both reinforced and reconstituted how individuals physically interacted with technical objects. Scholars have traced this dynamic relationship in a number of contexts, uncovering how electrical machines were made to enhance, heal, adorn, fetishize, and mysticize bodies during this time period (de la Peña, 2003; Marvin, 1988; Sconce, 2000). At a fundamental level, the role of bodies—of making contact—was drawn into question by virtue of electricity's ability to remove obstacles of distance and embodiment from communication (Peters, 1999). John Durham Peters importantly notes, “If communication was once the problem of distance minds, by the late nineteenth century it was the problem of proximate bodies” (1999, p. 180). This essay further considers this “problem of proximate bodies” by exploring popular representations of politicians’ physical actions transmitted over distance, interrogating how media accounts made sense of virtual ribbon-cutting ceremonies carried out by presidents using the telegraph to inaugurate a world's fair. Through a critical analysis of articles from newspapers and newsmagazines, the paper considers how discourses of presence, absence, power, mastery, and tactility were constructed for readers between 1884 and 1933. Based on this analysis, I argue: (1) for increased scholarly attention to the ways that bodies transmit themselves through acts of long-distance connectivity, past and present; and (2) for the creation of a robust cultural history, of which this article serves as a preliminary step, that examines precursors to teleoperation (such as telemedicine, telework, and even remote warfare) and telepresence within the broader historiography of communication and media. The conclusion of this article will examine how stories of long-distance button-pressing events relate to broader concerns about distance, spectacle, and power, while also considering the role of buttons as interfaces in contemporary culture.

As “artificial realms” outside of everyday reality, world's fairs and expositions offered utopian platforms for showcasing new technologies in a non-threatening setting (Adams, 1995). 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 (Nye, 1990). 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 often were designed to “win the hearts and minds” of participants, advancing hegemonic and imperialistic policies through expressions of regional and national pride (Bennett, 1995; Rydell, 1984). 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 (Cawelti, 1968; Ganz, 2008; Oldenziel, 1999; Perdue, 2010). Although many individuals could not attend these events, journalists often packaged interpretations for their readers that related more broadly to what it meant to press a button at this time period; for example, electric buttons often signified luxury and laziness of a wealthier class, and they were viewed suspiciously by laypersons (Marvin, 1988, p. 124). Watching a president press the button—or reading about it in the news—would have conjured strikingly different reactions depending upon the social and cultural position of the audience member or reader in question.

It is no surprise then that presidents would have employed the telegraph to stage opening ceremonies of world's fairs; not only did this mode of communication and action greatly reduce expense and time commitment, but it also reinforced the ideals of the exposition and its rhetorical promise to expose visitors to the most cutting edge technology in a celebration of national achievement. In all spheres of life, users had adopted the telegraph as a profound technology of control that extended and reorganized the ways they managed relationships and environmental spaces (Beniger, 1986; Coe, 1993; Howe, 2007; Lubrano, 1997; Standage, 1998). According to James Carey (1992), “The telegraph not only allowed messages to be separated from physical objects; it also allowed communication to control physical processes actively,” for example, by dictating train schedules for the circulation of goods cross-country (p. 157). James Beniger (1986) similarly notes that telecommunications technologies, including the telegraph, followed from a “crisis of control” occurring in the 1800s (p. 432). Using the telegraph at world's fairs as a kind of remote control—although historical actors would not have yet named it as such—took this concept one step further. By examining how presidents employed the telegraph to transmit touch across distance, this article offers a pre-history to remote control devices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As a technology that mediated between bodies and the natural/physical world, the telegraph also muddled what was previously known about presence/absence, embodiment, and disembodiment. In his study of “electronic presence,” Jeffrey Sconce (2000) notes that, “Telegraph lines […] appeared to carry the animating ‘spark’ of consciousness itself beyond the confines of the physical body” (p. 7). In the case of the world's fair, a telegraph wired from a remote location to machinery at the event site dramatized this spark of consciousness further by activating steam engines, lights, and other displays on the fairgrounds, as though an invisible hand had reached across thousands of miles to press a button. Reporters would then describe the tactile act for readers in an effort to make it visible for those who could not physically attend the fair or see the president at another location with his finger on the button. Peters (1999) points significantly to the problem of touch as a communicable sense through technology, writing: “Of all the senses, touch is the most resistant to being made into a medium of recording or transmission. It remains stubbornly wed to the proximate; indeed, with taste, it is the only sense that has no remote capacity” (p. 269). Indeed, button-pressing acts failed too at literally transporting touch across the wires, much as telephones and radios would encounter the same difficulties. The case of the world's fair button-pressing ceremony offers insight, then, not into the impossibility of touching someone across a distance at this time period, but rather into tactile aspects of human–machine interactions and to the ways that hands can communicate politically, socially, and culturally.

To this end, this article identifies a historically specific articulation of “touch” circulating between the 1880s and 1930s. Most reporters of button-pressing events referred to presidents’ interactions as acts of touch rather than “presses” or “pushes,” although in other contexts these terms existed with equal frequency. When journalists invoked “touch” as a primary way of describing opening ceremonies at world's fairs, they commented importantly on the corporeal aspects of button-pressing, to the humanness and physicality of activities with a high degree of technical sophistication. This particular framing raises questions not only about what it meant to “touch” a button between the 1880s and 1930s, but also about the term more broadly and its evolution into a present-day buzzword across a number of media platforms.

Finally, as this paper investigates media discourses and their construction of the button event, it also historicizes the interface as a media technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The word “button,” from the French bouton, originally referred to “a pimple, any small projection” or “to push, thrust forwards,” beginning in the fourteenth century (Wedgewood, 1878). While impossible to pinpoint any single “origin” of pushbuttons, these surfaces evolved from a number of early switch mechanisms including the keys of musical instruments and from other key-driven devices such as typewriters and telegraphs (Raykoff, 2011). Buttons and keys at this time often connoted automaticity and a blurring of lines between human and machine effort (Gitelman, 1999). Popular slogans like “you press the button, we do the rest” propagated by the Eastman company began to transform the button into a “black box,” often selling a vision of the interface that made it appear simultaneously effortless and powerful (Latour, 1988; Sylvester, 1893). Still, conflicting opinions and perceptions circulated about buttons; at certain moments historical actors described these interfaces as mundane/ordinary, and at other times they imagined buttons as encapsulating the essence of electrical progress, machine efficiency and magical possibilities of future technologies. A wide variety of buttons and meanings attached to them make this interface a fascinating and moving target from which to study humans, machinery, and tactile communication.

Cultural Caché of the Co-located Spectacle

Before long-distance button-pressing events became common or even desirable, presidents orchestrated opening ceremonies up close and in person. Remotely conducted technological spectacles would have held little cultural caché without first establishing familiar and ritualistic aspects of the fair. The Chicago World's Fair of 1893, also known as the World's Columbian Exposition, first introduced the button act on a large scale, using the telegraph key to electrify the event's machines. As an answer to the highly successful 1889 Paris World's Fair, the United States designed the Columbian Exposition to boast about the nation's industrial prowess to the rest of the world (Schlereth, 1990). “[A]dvertis[ing] technical achievements, inventions and products,” notes scholar Judith Adams (1995) in her study of the exposition, the World's Fair dramatized the marvel of technology on an unprecedented scale (p. 45). By early April 1893, a month before the fair's start, a number of media outlets began to rally around the button event and to discuss its significance, in part due to the fair committee's decision to move the opening ceremony to an open-air forum that could accommodate a large crowd of viewers.

“150,000 Persons Able to See the President Press the Button,” claimed a reporter for the Washington Post (“New Plan,” 1893), noting that the new schema would allow “many opportunities for picturesque effects” (p. 1). Reporters began educating readers not only about the button as a symbolic object, but also about the connection between button-presser and the natural/technical forces in play. On April 23, 1893, an article entitled “He will press the button: And electricity and steam will do the rest,” carefully described the process by which Cleveland would press the button: “… when President Cleveland stands in front of the administration building and places the middle finger of his good right hand on the electric button and gives it a push, there will follow such a buzzing and whirling of wheels and flashing of lights as was never seen before.” The author continued to dramatically dissect the nature of the machinery, its tools, and how the president should complete the act: “A very slight touch of Grover's finger will suffice. The current will start and the valve will open, the steam will escape and the great Allis engine will begin to move. At the same time 100,000 incandescent lights will flash all in the twinkling of an eye and in the presence probably of upward of half a million of people” (p. 15). These excerpts offer telling insight into one common strain of media discourses related to the button-pressing event, in which reporters would demonstrate the spectacle of humans and electricity working in tandem. Yet, the above author made clear that the president and his machinery did not occupy equal footing—man dominated over nature and technology through the button act—his finger, his right hand, controlled the conveyance of electricity. Given electricity's indeterminate status in American culture, all at once a “political issue, an element of spectacle, a means of transportation, a motive force and a source of profit,” according to historian David Nye (1990), the button-pressing act helped to reassure fair participants that behind every technological marvel stood a powerful, physical human being in charge (p. 138).

Due to readers' likely inexperience with electricity and remote technological acts at this time period (in this case the distance between the fair podium and Machinery Hall only a short walk away), media outlets worked to educate them about the appropriate response to the event. “People likely to jump when the President touches the button at Chicago,” proclaimed an April 27 article in the New York Times, which conjectured how the singular moment would unfold (“Features of the opening,” 1893). The early part of the article focused on educating the readership in rather plain terms, suggesting that “any telegraph operator would say [the key] had a familiar appearance.” As a common object, the telegraph key held little importance in itself; rather, the event represented the significance of what the button could do and how such a technological feat could change the shape and scope of humans’ technological interventions. Indeed, the latter part of the article explicated how a seemingly mundane object would provoke drama and even fear in the audience: “Mr. Cleveland will not only start the fair going, but at the same time electric current will start in Machinery Hall the largest steam whistle in the world, and the noise it will make will not only surprise the President, if he is not cautioned beforehand, but it will be heard on the Michigan side of Lake Michigan, nearly forty miles away.” The author continued, “[The button] will wake the echoes in the great exposition buildings, cause people to think that the judgment day has come, and give the great World's Fair a send-off that the mere starting of the machinery could not hope to do” (p. 3). While speaking with awe about the button act, the author also described the potential trauma of the event. What would happen if the president were startled or not fully in control? Would the sound evoke a feeling of celebration or awaken the crowd's deepest fears of judgment day? Foregrounding fears provoked by push-button warfare in the mid-twentieth century, this juxtaposition of mundane telegraph key with apocalyptic visions of doomsday signified the contradictory nature of electricity in social discourses; as Carolyn Marvin (1988) notes, historical actors of this time period often viewed electrical technology as a “menace” deeply tied to “theories of disaster,” even while lauding its praises in other contexts (p. 119).

When the day of the World's Fair arrived and it came time for the button event, President Cleveland invoked many tropes of democracy, scientific advancement, and technological wonder in order to signify the importance of the moment and assuage any fears about what the event might mean: “As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast exposition is set in motion,” he told a crowd of approximately 150,000 onlookers, “so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and freedom of mankind” (Dedicatory and opening ceremonies, 1893, p. 265). After describing the great electrical marvel triggered by the president's action, the New York Times (“Features of the opening,” 1893) reported on the scene: “A new era had dawned, an era in which the principles which have had their most flourishing growth in the fertile soil of America, would be borne to the farthest quarter of the globe by the representatives of the nations here assembled.” This hyperbolic rhetoric of American progress emerged from the manufacture of an incredible spectacle conducted by the president; at the same time, the journalistic package lauded the power of technological touch, imbuing the event with near-religious significance—a common rhetorical turn in the nineteenth century that connected electrical and technological forces with the work of God (Marvin, 1988; Nye, 1992; Sconce, 2000; Simon, 2004). By figuring the button act as an example of the “technological sublime,” a concept explicated by scholars Leo Marx (1964), David Nye (1994) and others, the article described the opening ceremony in terms of a “shared emotion beyond words” (Nye, 1994, p. xiv). The moment also provided resolution for any anxieties that had appeared in the months and weeks leading up to the event. Describing the president's successful deployment of the button as he sanctified the world's fair through his touch, the New York Times and a number of other media outlets called upon their readers to celebrate the act of technological mastery made in the presence of thousands of witnesses. During a time fraught with complications, contradictions, and rapid social changes, opening ceremonies where presidents stood before a crowd and pressed the button primed readers for what was to come: increased spectacle and increased control of technology and the environment from a distance (Badger, 1979; Cawelti, 1968).

Transitioning to Long-distance Events

Although politicians had occasionally employed the telegraph to initiate fairs and other important events from a distance (usually only by conveying a message), long-distance button events would become increasingly popular—and even standard—in the years following the World's Columbian Exposition. No other teleoperated event would match the one designed by fair organizers to start the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Created to reproduce the grandeur and spectacle once witnessed in Chicago, the event hinged on an ambitious scheme to have U.S. 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, combining long-distance communication, synchronicity, and remote activation of machines, capitalized on a fantasy of globalized technological touch:

At 2 o'clock, Buffalo time, by arrangement with the cable companies leading to South America, and with the telegraphic companies, and with the Atlantic cable companies, the Presidents and Rulers of all the countries of the Western Hemisphere will be requested to touch an electric button in their office, which will thus start a piece of machinery of the Exposition […] President McKinley, from his special train, will start the great fountain pumps, and will transmit over the wires a message of greeting to the people assembled on the occasion of the opening. (“The Pan-American Fair,” 1901)

The New York Times 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 technologically driven entities including cable companies, telegraphic companies, and locomotive engineers came together around a common purpose, received voluminous praise in a number of media sources 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 upon the button and bring an event to life, these sources noted, pointing to a kind of omnipotence once unimaginable.

Due to this new human-technology configuration of carrying out opening ceremonies across a distance, newspapers and magazines played an important role in providing a “behind-the-scenes” perspective on the various components involved. Describing a moment at the White House on April 15, 1902 when President Roosevelt started the Masonic Fair with his family members as witnesses, the Washington Post reported: “At the White House a scene of interest almost as intense as that which held those at the fair spellbound was enacted.” The article continued, “At the supreme moment three taps of the key sounded, and the President pressed down another key, which was the signal for the opening, and all was over. The children had manifested an intense interest in the proceeding from beginning to end, and required the operator to explain the whole system to them before their distinguished parent touched the button” (”Masonic Fair is open,” 1902). Transporting readers to the White House, the article depicted a scene of “intensity” during the “supreme moment” with a “spellbound” audience of the president's children, offering an omniscient view of the long-distance button-pressing act. Here, the journalist could simultaneously provide multiple scenes and perspectives; after describing the president at his desk in Washington, DC, the reporter went on to dramatize the scene witnessed at the fair and its animated machinery—creating a bridge between the button act and the physical opening ceremony. One could never witness these two events at the same time; thus, newspaper reports offered a special kind of mediation for readers that brought remote acts together. In this manner, texts about the long-distance ceremony also offered a form of authentication to readers—verifying the true nature of the button-pressing act (Peters, 1999). Without this important step, only a privileged few would bear witness to the president's touch.

Just as media stories could act as sutures between button-pressing event and fair event, they could also work to expose the proceedings as artificial—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 fair grounds 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 a section entitled, “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.”

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.

Media Discourses of Teleoperation and Telepresence

Unlike a typical telegraphic message, meant to be seen and experienced only by its transmitter and receiver, use of the telegraph to conduct activities across distance made the technological touch transmittable to the site of the fair and offered a potent story for journalists to communicate. The act of a simple finger push stimulating the wheels of a great machine from thousands of miles away took on an almost mythical (and often metaphorical) quality in media discourses. An 1897 editorial in The Semi-Weekly Tribune 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” (“Masonic Fair is open,” 1897). The author later concluded, “[W]e 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” (“May he touch the right button,” 1897). 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 teleoperation took hold as a compelling way of understanding politics and technology. If the president could touch a telegraph key to “awaken” machinery and bring a fair to life, he should similarly have the ability to operate a metaphorical switchboard for the country's betterment.

On a more mundane level, attention to teleoperation appeared in media accounts through basic descriptions of the technical act that outlined what it would take to connect a president to machinery across long distances. In preparation for the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, the New York Times reported: “A gang of electricians and linemen of the Western Union Telegraph Company arrived this noon and began running a line, cutting in the wire on the main line of the Wood's Holl branch from Gray Gables Station to the President's Summer home” (“Atlanta's Great Exposition.” (1895, September 18). New York Times, p. 9.). Nearly 10 years later the Washington Post described a similar scene in anticipation of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1905:

The ceremonies incident to the opening of the exposition will take place in the East Room of the White House, where wire connections are now being made, which, when completed, will place the President in direct communication with the massive machinery of the exposition, which he will start by simply closing a Morse telegraph key, constructed of gold, handsomely mounted, through which the electrical energy will be directly transmitted over a specially arranged wire of the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company. (“Opened the fair,” 1905)

In each of the above examples, and many others like them, reporters provided an inside look at technical mechanisms that would afford the president a medium for long-distance transmission. While some authors routinely referred to the button as “magic” and alleged the technology had mystical powers, others grounded the act in reality by describing the telegraph's wires for their readers. By devoting sizable space to these descriptions, reporters imbued teleoperation with concrete materiality. Articles about labor, effort, and devices involved in long-distance ceremonies made the president less a figure of wizardry, a conjurer, and more a human being connected in a network of other technological objects and actors.

Media discourses also made presidents’ actions visible to readers by focusing on the corporeality of these button-pressers. While present-day implementations of telepresence and telework usually involve sight through screens to verify the individual(s) participating from a distance, in this case of early telepresence the act of touch served as a primary mode of authentication and a mechanism for distributing electrical forces. Numerous press accounts provided a lens through which to make sense of this authentication, focusing on hands, fingers and tactile interactions and their relationship to electricity: “The electric current will come bounding fresh from the hand of President Cleveland,” wrote a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution in 1895; “Touching a golden key in one corner of the East Room, President Roosevelt yesterday released the lightning that leaped across the continent to the Pacific shore,” the Washington Post commented in 1905 ( “Opened the fair,” 1895). “Promptly President Wilson in reply pressed the button which connected by wireless with San Francisco, and caused a crash of electric energy in the wiring atop of the Tower of Jewels,” the New York Times told readers in 1915 ( “President opens fair by wireless,” 1915). These few representative instances across 20 years of media coverage demonstrate how reporters continually tried to take a disembodied hand or finger and connect it to a piece of machinery thousands of miles away. Using electricity as an interstitial force between button-presser and fair spectacle, these authors lauded the potency of touch across distance through the telegraph button medium, while authenticating for readers that in fact the important touch had actually occurred. At times the body of the button-presser became invisible in journalists' stories, referring to the hand as an all-powerful source of transmission; in other circumstances, as discussed below, reporters tried to reconcile bodies with the act of touch.

Transmitting Gendered Bodies

Bodies often came to the fore in discourses that emphasized the gender of the button-presser, particularly when public figures other than the president—such as presidents’ wives—were enlisted to touch the button. Although these women could operate the technology, they rarely garnered the same level of respect as did males in the same position. The North American paper of Philadelphia (“Mrs. Cleveland's touch,” 1886), for example, related to readers how Mrs. Cleveland readied to press 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” (“Mrs. Cleveland's touch,” 1886). Here, the newspaper emphasized Mrs. Cleveland's feminine and “delicate” appearance, while enforcing the masculine nature of the button act by mentioning President Cleveland's admonishment. While the president's wife received the honor of pressing the button, she quickly became the butt of a joke for her technological incompetence. The paper had sent Mrs. Cleveland's body through the wires by codifying her appearance and performance, taking stock of her looks and tactile skills. Even though readers could not witness these physical aspects, the author imposed the button-presser's body upon the story.

The Atchison Daily Globe paper described a similar scene in 1888 when former President Polk's wife started the Cincinnati Exposition. In addition to addressing the circumstances of the button-pressing 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 […]” (“The widow of President Polk,” 1888). Interjecting details of Mrs. Polk's appearance into her involvement in the technological spectacle, the newspaper established the woman as “other”; where presidents’ acts often were described merely in terms of their hands and their command of the button, women's bodies as a whole were put on display. Making hands and bodies visible for readers, news articles showed a woman at work, making her easy to relate to and domesticated while also in control (Johnston, 1997).

Women-powered button-pressing ceremonies did not occur within a vacuum, however. 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 (Gooday, 2008; Oldenziel, 1999; Schlereth, 1990). And beyond the setting of a world's fair, the act of pressing a button during this time period connoted a variety of gendered meanings. Individuals often coded buttons either as symbolic interfaces of domesticity, femininity, and effortlessness, or as tools of domination, masculine control, and intimidation, depending on the technological system and the historical moment in question (Hine, 1986; Taylor, 2001). In the case of automobiles and electric button ignition in the early twentieth century, for example to press a button to start a car, took on dual meanings: on the one hand, the simple act of touching implied feminine weakness and a desire for convenience and comfort. On the other hand, engineers and marketers developed new push-button technologies with women in mind, thus positioning women as trendsetters who fueled innovations in the automobile industry (Scharff, 1999). As a cultural event accessible to the masses through print media, the button event signified women's liminal position in relationship to science and technology, both in private and public spheres (Cawelti, 1968; Cowan, 1983). A president's wife occupied a unique position as both instrument of power and object of spectacle when she pressed the button.

The above examples reveal conflicting societal attitudes toward buttons as gendered objects; as previously mentioned, a number of industries targeted women as users of buttons in domestic life and emphasized a distinctly feminine form of control. In the case of button-pressing events, however, rhetoric of masculinity routinely dominated media accounts to describe the button and presidents’ interactions with it. This helped to label the telegraph as a tool of masculine vitality and power that did not gain the same prominence in other sectors. In the words of a self-described “intelligent Englishman” who attended the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, for example, President Cleveland “showed himself in more than the mere official sense the king of the situation” during the opening ceremony (Stead, 1893, p. 657). 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” (Schaeffer, 1893). 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. In broader discussions of electricity too, notes scholar Carolyn Marvin (1988), individuals vacillated between viewing nature “as an object of conquest” or as “an ally with whom mankind was in direct dialogue” (p. 151). The case of button-pressing events fits squarely within these polarized perspectives, as the telegraph button quickly became ensnared in gendered politics by challenging physical and cultural associations with technology.

Presidents' button-pressing acts also occurred within a more widespread cultural discussion about gender, bodies, and technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when popular views emphasized electricity as both conduit and metaphor for human strength and vitality. Writing on the evolution of electricity in 1891, science author Arthur E. Kennelly conjectured that, “The relation between electricity and vitality may be so close as to amount to identity” (1891, p. 153). This view of science, in which bodies and electrical energies aligned, further infused opening ceremonies of world's fairs with metaphors of connectivity and life forces transmitted through wires. As the fleshy body of a presidential figure connected with an electrically charged telegraph key, both man and machine would animate beyond the capacity of either entity alone. These experiments with electricity constituted but one of many in the context of pervasive questions about human and electrical forces. Talk of the human touch, amplified by technology, saturated media discourses not only for what it represented politically, but also for what it meant in terms of demystifying bodies and their inner workings.

Conclusion

Button-pressing ceremonies spanned over 50 years, punctuating some of the most notable events in American history. These episodes captured the public imagination and garnered widespread media coverage that proclaimed the button's role in technological progress, but they also served as catalysts for larger contemplation about technologized touch, control across distance, and telepresence. By 1933, as electricity had become increasingly commonplace and predictable, and with new technologies that promoted distance communication burgeoning in homes including telephones and radios, the button-pressing event lost much of its rhetorical power. Yet, even as late as 1927 the media looked fondly back to a time when these events played an important role in American culture. Reflecting on an 1884 event when President Arthur touched a button from a distance to start the New Orleans World's Industrial Cotton Exposition, the Washington Post identified this event as “the first time [long distance button-pressing for an opening ceremony] was done” and called it a “thrilling experiment” (“Opening exposition an event,” 1927). “It was made the occasion of an elaborate social function,” the paper noted, citing the numerous political figures in attendance at the White House to observe and serve as witnesses of the long-distance touch. More than 40 years later, the act had maintained its potency as a symbol of technical mastery and political control in the popular discourse—yet more than a “pseudo event,” the act of commemorating a world's fair from a distance served as an early trial in demonstrating telepresence and teleoperation (Boorstin, 1971). Media discourses acted as translators of such performances, providing a number of frames that would make sense of this new human-technology configuration. Descriptions of a president's hand or finger harnessing electricity to bestow a technological touch upon a fair appeared prominently in newspapers and magazines, as reporters tried to place the long-distance event within a broader cultural conversation about natural forces, bodies, and machines. The case of fairs triggered by telegraph encourages scholars to consider the many ways in which remote action has manifested historically; it also prompts questions about the role of bodies in communicative acts, particularly those unseen bodies that can only travel through wires, ether, screens, and buttons (Douglas, 1987; Peters, 1999; Sconce, 2000).

The button-pressing event for world's fairs has particular salience for scholars interested in issues of technology, power, control, and distance (e.g. Beniger, 1986; Chun, 2006; Edwards, 1996; Parks, 2005). No ordinary button-pressers, presidents for more than 50 years (and their wives on occasion) anointed these spectacles with a touch that embodied all of the cultural associations of the nation's highest office. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have considered aspects of bodily control and communication in digital spaces, ranging from virtual reality to virtual surgery (Hayles, 1999; Hillis, 1999; Paterson, 2006; Prentice, 2005). Yet rather than thinking of distance and bodily communication as wholly a phenomenon of “new” media, historical studies can offer valuable perspective on remote control and its ongoing role in spectacle, performance, and interactivity across time.

This article also aims to begin a conversation about the rhetorical impacts of touch, technology, and interfaces in media spaces. Those scholars who have importantly worked to advance touch as a sense worthy of study as it relates to technology have primarily dealt with the subject ahistorically (Benthien, 2002; Classen, 2005; Marks, 2002; Paterson, 2007). As a result, there is a tendency to treat technology either as a disembodying force that will continue to alienate humans from their material world, or as a radical promise of the future in which human/technology distinctions will cease to exist. The same applies to those studies of interfaces as social and cultural objects, with emphasis on surfaces such as buttons, screens, and keys as contemporary technologies as opposed to situating them within different historical moments (Johnson, 1997; Pold, 2008), although notable exceptions exist (Bardini, 2000; Hine, 1986; Manovich, 2001). A rigorous study of any interface must take into account what it means to call something a “button” or a “key” as it pertains to its social, historical, and cultural context.

Finally, the case of long-distance button-pressing events brings questions to the foreground about the nature of “buttons” as interfaces in the present day (Siegler, 2009). In his study of software (digital) buttons, Søren Pold (2008) notes that buttons “make the world feel controllable, accessible, and conquerable,” an observation that certainly applies in the case of long-distance button-pressing events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as much as it does today (p. 35). And yet, by the sheer fact that fewer and fewer physical/mechanical buttons exist—many now mere representations in the form of pixels on screens—what it means to “push” a button takes on radically different meaning both tactilely and culturally. Where once presidents touched a telegraph key to bring a fountain or a waving flag to life, now presidents give orders for clicks and touches that send drones on targeted assassination missions halfway around the world (Adams, 2010; Margolick, 2010; Mazzetti, 2009). The scope, conditions and effects of these acts are radically different, and yet they raise similar concerns about what happens when bodies, spectacle, distance, and political power merge at the tactile interface. While touch, as Peters (1999) notes, may constitute the most difficult sense to communicate remotely, it is also perhaps the most potent when effectively communicated; one touch of a button, one finger can have interminable reach.

Acknowledgments

The author extends her heartfelt thanks to Jennifer Light, Lynn Spigel, Eszter Hargittai, Fred Turner, and Roy Schwartzman for their helpful insights and comments on earlier drafts of this article. She also wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers and editorial staff of CSMC for their time and support. A previous version of this manuscript was presented at the 2010 National Communication Association conference in San Francisco.