Radiolab - Buttons Not Buttons

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

Tiny buttons have such a hold on us. They can be portals to power, freedom, and destruction. Today, with the help of buttons, we tell you about taking charge of the little things in life, about fortunes made and lost, and about the ease with which the world can end.  Confused? Push the button marked Play.Special thanks for the music of Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train OrchestraOur newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Yeah, wait, you're listening. Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. Ugh. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio.

From W and Y. Hey! Hey! Hey! Why? How did you even get onto... I feel like buttons has just become a fixture. How did this happen?

Okay, what can I possibly do? Let me start. I'm gonna start. This is reporter Latif Nasser, and today on Radio Lab, Latif and I are bringing Jed and you three wildly different stories about buttons that are really about power and freedom and destruction. So, this all started because I could not convince any of my friends to go to the elevator history museum with me There was not a single person out of the eight and a half million people living in New York who wanted to go to the button museum with me

You found what except for all recall it. I'll go to anything Jamie told me never to stop recording But I so we go to Long Island City like walk around you think it's right that door right there I personally can't find it. We got lost This street is entirely taxi yellow the only thing we saw was a big old boring building covered with with taxi size And we have no interest in taxis I mean see I mean we found some guy on the street. Yes, there is.

We got to go up to stairs, right? Yeah. Actually, I'll take you there. I'll take you there. I'll show you the way anyway. All right. We go all the way down, we go left,

rightening the wall, going down to the end. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Aha, wow, that's quite a sign. Elevator Museum. Founded 2011 by Patrick Carson. So we opened up the door.

Wow. We have no idea what's going to be on the other side of this. Not the thing. Hello? Whoa, this is different from what I get in here. It's a large room. It's a world. Are you building up to something, I hope?

It's filled with what is it? What stuff? Elevator matchbook here. It's a world. Are you building up to something, I hope? It's filled with... What is it? What stuff? Elevator matchbook here. Pens or witches and locks. Just random stuff. These are things you give us. The Rosenberg.

Lubricant. Small brass objects of one kind or another. And there are these giant paintings of escalators and moving sidewalks. And sitting in the corner. Hi, I'm Latham, across the room, we see a guy sitting. He's an older guy. Patrick Carr, he has his glasses down on his nose and he's in charge of the place. They can call me if they want to come visit 718. Apparently you're supposed to make an appointment. And if I'm in a mood they'll get a song. Patrick is being the lead singer in a number of bands,

and he even studied constitutional law. This is a man for all seasons. He's like, he's got so much elevator stuff. I've been collecting some 11 years old. Because when you were seven years old, you walked into an elevator and had a 11 years old. I started working with my dad. I went to college, got a couple of degrees,

and stayed in the elevator business. Never left. I actually my first item is over. over on one of the walls here. But let me show you something else. And as we're walking along, oh, that's like, this is like a hall of buttons. We come inevitably to a series of elevator button panels. Here's a golden up and down.

Here's a bronze up and down. Ooh, that's really fast. There's a silver up and down. Yeah. He has all kinds of antique buttons that, I mean, from just different eras. Here's one where you go spoo-poo-poo-poo-poo. So this is the Genesis right there. Right there is where the insult begins.

And it is an insult because what is about to happen is he's about to tell us that we are fools and have no power in the world in which he inhabits. And he does that by pointing to the closed door, but you know, when you push in the door supposed to close, he says, just says, matter of fact, he says, about 80% of the non-functional. Oh, wow. You know what? Because they are broken and no one fixed them because they didn't need you.

Because they never wired up. They were never wired up. Never wired up. Never. Most of the time we don't do it. About 80% of them don't work. I just assume they don't work. You assume they don't I assume they don't time Yeah, I thought no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this cannot be right. What do you mean it cannot be right? Have you ever put the close button that has had any effect on the door?

Yeah, it's like logical tool for you you need the button to go bang that for something Like you know, that's not but he said also he had also a very fancy reason. What was his fancy reason? There are extremely intelligent all of it is the elevator is actually remember what happens every day So the elevator system knows that between 8.55 and 9 o'clock we get 373 people in an average morning coming in so we're gonna return two cars to the main floor as soon as we possibly can. We're not going to park anything up upstairs. But it knows that at 4.45, it gets 650 people leaving the building.

You get three wheelchairs, you get two old people. And so we program the timing of the elevator to accommodate the hole. So all you're doing is screwing up our timing by touching that thing. I mean, you have thousands and thousands of people anxiously trying to urge the machine to do their will. Like watching people just keep pressing a stupid button. No, no, no. I mean, this is cruel. I have to tell you, his idea that we would somehow

have the authority or the power to close the door was offensive to him. Yeah. Now, in my building they work. I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint. But you'll be sympathetic because it's a... You're more a customer. Think of what a building is.

It's a crazy-ass vertical stack of humanity. How is that going to work if not for beautifully designed systems like the elevator? This is about freedom. This is about freedom. And this is about your power. You're insane. So, we then began looking around for some little soups of hope to give the radio lab listeners some tiny bit of power

that they could have back in this otherly fascistic system. And you know what you had to say. We found it. You did. What did you find? We have hacked the close button. Really? Wait.

Now I'm suddenly in for the first time I'm interested. What, what, what did you discover? The next time, Jack, that you walk into an elevator, the door closes and mysteriously, although you're going to the eighth floor, it stops on five. The door opens, you peer out, there's nobody there. And where is?

Six endless seconds. We'll roll by leaving you powerless and hapless, but not anymore. Now here's what you can do, and we check this and it's true. You can put your arm through the door, breaking the beam with your arm, and then yank your arm back very suddenly.

That will convince the stupid, stupid supine elevator that you have just, someone has just entered the elevator and now it will close. That will shape an amazing three or five seconds off your waiting time and it will give you that sense of being Superman. Yeah that's 45 minutes of your life pack. You're welcome. We are sad to say that due to rising rents, Patrick's elevator museum closed its doors back in 2016. Fittingly, no buttons were pushed for those doors to close. So the next story, this is maybe the most valuable button in the world.

It's not a button exactly, it's, it's, he was a guy and his name was Button Gwyneth. What is it? Button Gwyneth. B-U-T-T-O-N. Yep. Is that his real name? That's his real name. That's Bobby Livingston from R&R Auction House in Boston.

Who is Button Gwyneth? Button Gwyneth is one of two signers of the Declaration of Independence that were born in England and moved to the United States or moved to the colonies. He is a founding father. He's a founding father. You have seen his signature thousands of times without realizing it. And the thing about that signature gets interesting in a minute. But just to start at the beginning, Button guinette was born in England in the early 1700s and

then he moved to Georgia in 1765. And he bought an island and I believe he began an import- Gwyneth was born in England in the early 1700s and then he moved to Georgia in 1765. And he bought an island and I believe he began an import. He bought an island? Yep, St. Catherine's island. Truth is he leased it, but whatever. So he's like a just a wealthy guy? No, but Gwyneth was a serial debtor actually and he owed everybody, he owed everybody money.

So he failed in his business and he became a radicalized revolutionary. And he joined Georgia politics late in the 1760s. And when it got to be 1776 in Philadelphia, he was in Independence Hall. And he signed the Declaration of Independence. Really? To the left and below of John Hancock. But then he goes home to Georgia

and gets in a duel with his political rival when it was killed in 1777. And then I believe in 1780, his wife passes away, leaving only his daughter. And then by 1800, his daughter passes away and his lineage has disappeared. So Gwyneth's pass into history. Yes.

Yes. And then in 1780, the British burned Savannah to the ground. So any government documents that would have existed in the state archives are destroyed. But, a signature is on that very important piece of paper. It is true. Which becomes important because around the 1820s, the last of the signers of decoration and independence were dying. So there was a nostalgia for the founding fathers

and that's when people began collecting the signatures that were placed on that document. So people collected Jefferson and then Adams and a Hancock and they started thinking, okay, I want a whole set of the 56 men that signed that document. People want the set. They want the set.

For an American, I don't think there was any more important signature than the signatures that were placed on that document. Get them all. And a problem arose. Button guennat signatures who were almost impossible to find. And even now, like, going 100 and some more years later,

one guy, I went to see his collection and he had a beautiful house in Florida overlooking the bay, I won't tell you which bay, but he showed me some great stuff. And I said, what else you got? And he goes, I swear, he pushes a button on a wall begins to rise. And on the wall, he's got like, you know,

incredible, you know, Wilbur Wright, George Washington, but I could see in the middle my eye goes right to it, the unmistakable signature of button guanette is like the centerpiece of this secret wall that raises up and I go, my goodness, you've got a button guanette, it was pretty amazing. And so this is the autographic equivalent of some really famous diamond, you know, or something like that. That's right.

You know, it's the Holy Grail. Wait, how many signatures still exist? There are 50, 51. 51 known examples in the world. And most of the things that exist are IOUs. Ha, ha, ha. If you have one of these things, what are they worth? Well, I'll tell you this.

It is more valuable than Lincoln. Much more, 100 times more than Abe Lincoln. What? Really, what about more than Abe Lincoln. What? Really, what about George Washington? Yep. Ben Franklin? Yes. Yes. But when it outsells, Ben Franklin was a world famous person.

But Ben Franklin was a man of letters. He wrote tons of letters. He was president of Pennsylvania. He was the ambassador to France. He wrote and wrote and wrote and signed and signed and signed. So there's, Bobby Livingston told us with the exception, possible exception of William Shakespeare. This guy, button guinette, ran up a bunch of debt,

did basically nothing else in his life. He is the most valuable signature in the world. Today, what makes it extremely hard to complete a set of signers, the Declaration of Penance is because of the 51. 41 are in libraries or institutions and will never be able to get it. So there's only 10 examples in public hands. Hello, sir. Hello, sir.

How you doing? Good. Okay, you checked your bags and everything. So it turns out that there are four button guinets at the at the New York Public Library. Yeah, we're just writing our neighborhood closed. I believe the reading room is still close, but we're going to a kind of super secret place where you need to ring a bell to get in. Really? So I emailed them up. I emailed the guy named Thomas Lannan. I worked in the Manuskips Narcass Division at the New near public library. He took us into a special room on the top floor.

Ooh, wow, this is awesome. All by ourselves. Yeah, I guess we'll put them on the wood. We're at the standing at a wooden, like a kind of beautiful wooden table. And we have on the table four button goonets, four. Wait a minute, just so I can appreciate. Tell me one of these is worth.

You don't know until they're sold because they're different quality, but the last one that we know of that was sold here in New York was sold for $722,500. I don't, I'm not in the business of estimating value of things, but I can say that button when I autographs at the New York Public Library are classified as splendid. Highest ranking, splendid? They're not, they're not simply cut autographs, they're a document signed. Look at this, look at this. This is the most extravagant one. Oh wow, it has like seals on it, like red wax seals.

There might have been like four million dollars sitting on that table. We got four million dollars. So for me, the impulse, the impulse I'm having right here is not just putting these in my pocket and running away. The impulse I'm having and I'm being totally frank here is the same impulse I have, when you wanna pull the fire alarm, I just wanna just tear these all up right now.

Kind of. I just wanted to take all of these papers that were on this table and just tear them all the shreds. I can't speak to you, it is the higher to destroy history. And then the guy really looked alarm. But you don't really want to tear these up. You have to admit. It's just so valid.

Like it's so arbitrarily valuable. Like I could just rip it up. Like, how could it be that valuable? Like it just rip it up. But it is. Okay, so taking a cue from Latif, when we come back, we're going to take a decidedly anti-button turn. We'll be right back. This is Radio Lab, I'm Chad Abumarad. Today on the podcast, lots of NASA and Robert Krawich are talking buttons.

So we have one more button tail. In a way, this sort of, once we were on to buttons, this sort of presented itself because it is the most high stakes button. Ever. Yeah. As the president,

we have a crisis situation that one of our missile centers, sir. A thermonuclear button. You mean to tell me, a renegade general's got his finger on the button of a tight missile? Oh! Is it a button? I mean, I, it's what we wanted to be wanting.

It's a big, big ticket in Hollywood as a big red button. Big red button. Exactly. So we just figured, OK, let's go find the button that destroys the world. Okay. So we brought in a friend of mine, Alex Wellerstein. He's a historian of all things nuclear weapon related. Yeah.

He sat down and the first thing he told us was that. There's no button. No button. No. There has never been a single button. Well, wait a second. Like, don't, when you get to like 1952, 1953, in ordinary parlance, people say, well, the president has his finger on the button.

I mean, I don't know. Do you have any idea where that phrase comes from? The button. It's older. It's much older than the bomb. Oh, really? So 1910s is when all of this stuff, HG Wells is sort of famous,

but there's all this literature about the crazy scientists who invent a new form of gas that can like kill everybody. And he has a button. And is it a red button? I don't know if they say red. But it's definitely a button. And according to Alex, by the time we developed nuclear weapons, existing imagery about

the scientists can blow up the world using their button, transfers to the president can blow up the world using his button. And then Alex told us something that we really surprised us. He said, when the US government dropped those first bombs on Japan. So the bomb that they dropped in Hiroshima, they didn't take off with the bomb armed. They took off with the bomb missing a piece.

And the missing piece is, it's a chunk of uranium. And then one of the scientists who was also a military guy crawled into the back of this plane while it was in route opened up the bomb put the missing piece back into it and then closed the back up again and turned on all the electrical switches that said if we drop you out of a plane you're going to have the detonate. It will explode when it's a certain number of feet off the ground, so pressure will trigger it. And as for finger on the button,

the finger, which belonged to Harry Truman, President of the United States, was 11 time zones removed and, frankly, unaware of the act. Truman, he didn't issue an order himself. He sort of approved an order that was already being issued from the Secretary of War to the commanders out there. And it said, you have two of these special bombs,

that's what they called them, special bombs. And here are your four targets, you can drop them on. You can drop them on Hiroshima, you can drop them on Nagasaki, you can drop them on Kokura, and you can drop them on Nigata. Basically he says, at any day after August 3rd, he'll free drop the bomb. What?

He said, here's a couple of different options, choose. Choose. Here's some bombs, here's some cities, here's some days. Here's some days. Go for it. No. F***ing way. Other than that, the only considerations are operational. So the bombing order says you have to be able to see the target

before you drop it. And that's it. Wow. One of the interesting things that I found out later, there was a town called Kokura, and that was the Plan B town or Sissiti, rather, for Hiroshima, but the weather that day happened to be good in Hiroshima, so they dropped it there. And then the next time, that was actually the plan A city for Nagasaki, but the weather was bad there.

And so then the bomb Nagasaki, but so this city of Kokura got spared twice. Like it was so close. And so Truman doesn't even know, he gets told, oh, by the way, we dropped the bomb yesterday. You mean when the bomb dropped in Hiroshima? He had no idea it would be Hiroshima. He did not know what Hiroshima was doing. He did not know what day. The second bomb, he seems to have been caught off guard

and he actually issues, this is his only way of getting involved, the issue is an order which says stop dropping atomic bombs until I tell you to. I feel like if you're a president and you're gonna do that to that many people, I feel like you should be directly responsible. It should not be an arbitrary decision.

Like, I kind of want a button in this case. No, no, no. You wouldn't actually want there to be a button, right? You could bump a button, right? A button is too easy, right? You don't want it to be easy enough that you set your coffee down on the Oval Office table and like kill the world, right? Like, obviously nobody wants to do that.

Nobody wants to do that. And I think it's, you know, I have to admit when you first were pitching the button thing I was thinking, where are they going to go with this? How is this going to work? And the more I was thinking about it, it's sort of a deep concept, right? It's about the ease in which you could actually destroy all of civilization because of the technology. What you could not do in the 19th century, you could not do with Genghis Khan, he could

do a lot of damage, but he could not kill all the people in the world. The button is the symbol of how easy that is. And the reason this becomes kind of crucial is we now are moving through the 50s into the 60s. For the first time, the cities of the United States and the people who live in them are vulnerable. In the early 60s, the United States is in a face-to-face with Chris Jeff over the Scribut missiles.

That Soviet military unit, solid state of combat readiness. And the world gets really, really, really close to annihilation. The way that it works at this time is that the president has an assistant, a military guy, who has all the nuclear codes in a briefcase a handcuffed to the assistant

I mean assistant if the president is in the bathroom The assistant is outside the door in the corridor if this president is at a football game at all time And so weirdly the the suitcase is called the football and I believe the page with the nuclear launch codes on it is called the biscuit And I believe the page with the nuclear launch codes on it is called the biscuit. Why? I have no idea. I have no idea where I got the name. So it's the 60s and things between the US and the Soviet Union are very tense. And there are generals on the joint chiefs, Curtis Lemme among them, who are bombs away Lemme. Yeah, they who are very who are not at all troubled by the possibility that this would be a weapon they would use. And they advocated very who are not at all troubled by the possibility that this would be a weapon they would use and they advocated Very specifically and very specific case. So even though there are no buttons and there are all these codes

People are still worried at the time about just how easy it would be for the president to launch a nuclear attack Right, so and one guy in particular this guy Roger Fisher is this sort of academic policy guy He's a Harvard Law School professor. He advised secretaries of state on the Iran hostage crisis on the Israel-Egypt peace accord. He definitely had the ear of the Pentagon. And he was troubled by this idea that the president could very dispassionately start nuclear war. And so he proposed this idea.

I'll jump in. The notion comes from his long interest in reducing the risk of war. Roger Fisher passed away, but we were able to talk to his two sons. I'm Elliott Fisher. I'm a professor at Dartmouth. And I'm Peter Fisher. I'm a senior fellow at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. So his solution to this, and by the way, this would be just in the case of a U.S. surprise

attack, what's called a first strike, was to instead of having all the codes be just in a suitcase. His idea was to get a volunteer who'd have the codes put under their heart. You embed the codes in some sort of capsule in the guy's heart. Surgeically, and he'd carry around a briefcase with a knife in it. A butcher knife. And if the president ever felt the urge to fire off the missiles, he has to go to the guy and say, well, now's time. Give me the knife. And then he would have to take the knife and drive it into the guy's chest. The president has to chop out this

code from this guy's heart. The president won't have to kill someone and pull the code out of their body. That he would have to first kill one person in order to get at the codes that would let him kill millions of people. He has to look at someone and realize what death is, Fisher writes. What an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. Its reality brought home. Fisher then says that he suggested this to friends in the Pentagon and their reply was,

my God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the president's judgment. He might never push the button. That's the whole point. Yes. The strongest objection is it might work. And even now, I think, you know, gosh, not a crazy idea at all to have the president be, if they're going to pull the trigger and blow the world up,

kill one person, because you're just to pull the trigger and blow the world up, kill one person. Because you're just about to kill tens of millions, mostly innocent people. And the button is just too easy, so we'll just make it harder. The button's too easy? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the butcher knife is the ultimate anti-button.

But how you can find a guy to put the codes inside his heart? I would volunteer. I would volunteer to be that guy. You would? Totally. A second I would volunteer to be that guy. You would volunteer to be stabbed in the heart by the president of the United States. And you know what I would do? I would make, like, I would be best friends with the President. We would take walks, we would go swimming together. It would be great. We would be best friends.

I would, that would be my mission. It would be to make it as hard as humanly possible for him to carve open my chest. Okay, we have some thank yous to make here. Why don't you go ahead. All right. First thank you to Catherine Kylachowski, the Elevator Historical Society Museum in Long Island City, New York. And the Slade Elevator Company and Pride and Service Elevator Company, both in New York

for helping us learn things. And to our friend Steve, who helped us understand what goes on among autograph collectors. Thank you to the very indulgent New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts Division. And Alex Wellstein has a nuclear history blog. He calls it restricted data. Check that out. Alex in turn wanted us to thank John Costa Mullen, Michael Gordon, Eric Schlosser, and Spencer Weird.

Man, special thanks to actors and Michael Charnes and Noah Robbins. And also, let's not forget Damiano Marquetti for production sport. And we thought we would just go out with our final salute to buttons by the one mechanism man created that hates a button. ["Motor of the Buccane"] The music you are hearing was ranged by, the composer Keith Harrison, it is a zipper rag. Zippers being mortal enemies of the button. The composer Keith Harrison is a zipper rag. Zippers being mortal enemies of the button.

On that note, you weirdos. We should go. I'm Chad Abumrock. I'm Robert Krohich. Go ahead, Latif. And I'm Latif Nasir. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrockrod and is edited by Sorn Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keefe is our director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Vatue Qsick, Akedi Foster Keys, W Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Basco, T.R.S, Sindhu Yana Sanban Dam, Matt Q.T., Annemee Q.N. Alex Nisen, Saurikari, Anara Squidbass, Sarah Sandbag, Ariana Wack, Pat Waters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinyales.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Kriger, and Natalie Melton. Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a five-month foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Dundational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The report for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.