Science Friday - Buttons, Grand Canyon Maps, Mosquitoes. Feb 8, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: February 8, 2019

The button is everywhere. It allows us to interact with our computers and technology, alerts us when someone is at the front door, and with a tap, can have dinner delivered to your home. But buttons also are often associated with feelings of control, panic, and fear. Rachel Plotnick, author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, discusses the development of buttons and what they reveal about our interactions with technology. New research finds that the same pathways in the brain that control human hunger can shut down a mosquito’s interest in biting you. Rockefeller University professor Leslie Vosshall tells us about how this technique can potentially inhibit female mosquitoes from seeking out human blood—and stop the spread of disease.    Later this month, the Grand Canyon celebrates the 100th anniversary of becoming a national park. But the natural wonder has way more than 100 years of stories to tell. The millions of years of geologic history, coupled with the massive scale of the canyon, make it challenging to create a comprehensive view of the Grand Canyon. Matthew Toro, director of maps, imagery, and geospatial data for the Arizona State University Libraries, tells us about maps of the iconic park to share its geologic and cultural stories.    Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Mosquito-borne illnesses, in fact, tens of millions of people and kill more than a million people every year, whether it's malaria, dengue, West Nile, or now Zika. And our war against the mosquito is a long and storied one. The repellent Diet turns 75 this year. And in the age of CRISPR, we're even talking about editing these critters right out of existence. But one lab at the University of Rockefeller had another idea. What if we just could convince female mosquitoes, the problematic ones, that they're just not hungry enough to bite us in the first place. What if we could put them on a diet? Here to talk about this more is Dr. Leslie Vossal, Professor of Neurobiology at the Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes

Medical Institute investigator in New York, New York. Dr. Vassal, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Thanks. I'm so excited. So why don't you start by telling us how often female mosquitoes actually bite? Because it feels like the same mosquito comes back and bites me all the time. So, first of all, they love us. They love to fill up on your blood, and as soon as they filled up and doubled their body weight, they actually will go into seclusion for four days. So the female that's just bitten you, you won't see her again for the next four days. Okay, so they bite and they go away for a while.

Why are they so attracted us in the first place? You say they like feasting on our blood? Why? They just love how we smell. So the mosquitoes that spread these diseases, they have specialized. on humans, so they're super sensitive to our body odor. Every time we exhale, we excite them with our carbon dioxide in our breath. They love that we're warm-blooded. But basically, these animals specialize on humans, and that's why they're so dangerous in spreading these diseases among humans.

So you decided to see how they would react to human diet drugs. Explain why. Well, we were really struck by this phenomenon that they will lose their appetite for four days after taking a blood meal. So our idea was how can we get them to do that without feeding on blood? And so we knew a little bit about how appetite works across the tree of life. And so one day we thought, why don't we just get some diet drugs and see if we can disrupt the appetite of mosquitoes? And that worked immediately. This was five years ago. And just over the course of a week, we were able to turn off mosquito attraction to humans just with a little dose of this drug.

Wow. So it really worked very quickly. It did. And then it took us five years to figure out how it was working and then how to get drugs that were specific just to insects and not people. So why drugs that are specific to insects and not people? If it works to give them human dye drugs, why don't just feed them human die drugs? Well, I mean, I think people always worry if you have a bunch of mosquitoes flying around with drugs that are non-specific. It would just be a more elegant strategy to get drugs that really are just working really effectively on things like, let's say, ticks and

malaria mosquitoes and Zika mosquitoes. So it's just we wanted to make it the most selective possible drug. And so how did you make this selection? How did you find something that worked specifically in the mosquito brain? So this was a huge looking for a needle in a haystack exercise. So my postdoc Laura DeValle looked individually at 265,000 compounds. And of those, she found six that actually worked on the mosquito. And those drugs do not, work on the human version of the same target. So five years later, we finally made it to the end of the journey. What do we know about how mosquitoes feel hunger? You say that when they have a blood meal, they go away for a couple days. Do we know anything about how they actually experience hunger?

It's this funny interplay between their need for protein, so they need blood to be able to get protein to produce eggs. And so we don't exactly know what's happening in their brains, but there's something about taking in this huge protein meal that unleashes a huge series of physiological events that are poorly understood, where basically the gut communicates to the brain that I am full. And so we think that our drugs hijack that conversation

between the gut and the brain, and that's why our drugs are turning off appetite. So you've got these drugs, they work, they're turning off the appetite, is the idea that this would eventually kill the mosquito, that they would die of hunger, or are you just trying to deprive them of that one meal? How's this supposed to work? So our drugs are not forever, so we don't kill our appetite forever, so they last for two or three days. And then when the drugs wear off, they will go back and either come back to our traps and drink

more of our drug, or they will find you and bite you. But where we think this is an innovative rate to control disease vectors is that any time you have mosquito take two or three days off from biting, that's some number of people who are not going to be bitten by infected mosquitoes. So these drugs are not going to kill mosquitoes. They're not going to eradicate mosquitoes. They will just take a population that will take a break from biting people. You mentioned having them come back to get more of this stuff. How are you dispersing this? How would this work as a practical solution getting this diet drug to mosquitoes? That's the really key question. So we need them to drink it, just like when you take.

pills, you need to take it into your mouth. We need the mosquitoes to drink it. And so the plan is working off of existing technology to lure mosquitoes to traps, use every day to figure out what the epidemiology of infected mosquitoes is, and we lure them in, and then waiting for them there is a cup of our drug mixed into this elixir that they love to drink, which is basically salty water with ATP. And so they'll land on the trap, they love the taste of that stuff, and they'll take the drug, and then they will go away for two or three days and think that they're full of blood. We're talking about mosquito science here, and I know, Dr. Vossal, that others have been looking at ways to just eradicate mosquitoes altogether, to edit them out of existence, or find ways

to just get rid of the species. Why don't just try that? Why don't just try to get rid of mosquitoes altogether? What do you see as the consequence there? So the whole mosquito community is working really hard on lots of ideas. to deal with this very old and very complicated problem and the eradication team is doing amazing work. I think that it will be difficult to eradicate all of the different species that are spreading diseases. Those approaches will have an impact.

But I'm a believer in integrating multiple different approaches. So vaccines, chemotherapies, and repellents, and then our strategy of behavioral appetite control. So I always get a little bit worried about eradicating a species on earth because we do have a web of life. And I don't know what will happen if we did succeed in killing all mosquitoes. I'd rather not do the experiment. Have you thought a lot about the unintended consequences of the work that you're doing now, putting them on a diet and having them not feed the same way? What are the potential consequences there?

So we don't know what the – it's a good point. We don't know what the potential consequences are. But again, we're not killing them. It's a temporary effect. So it may have some small local effects on populations, but the main benefit is that there will be fewer female mosquitoes flying around and biting people. What are the things we need to be thinking about to really solve the mosquito disease problem, not just mosquitoes, but all the diseases they carry? I mean, what are the public health needs here in the United States and elsewhere around the world that we might need to, we need to avail ourselves of to help to solve this big problem? And it is a huge, huge problem.

As long as there's been humans, there's been mosquito spreading diseases to them. And so, you know, there's a lot of areas of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are putting huge amounts of money into making vaccines, improving repellents, bed nets, the GMO approach, our behavioral control. All of these different technologies need to be brought to bear because we have not, the mosquito wins every time. the mosquito keeps winning. And so I don't think that there's any one approach that will put humans into a win. Earlier, I talked about Diet turning 75 this year. This is thought of it as a repellent. What do we know about how these repellents actually work on mosquitoes?

What's remarkable is that scientists cannot agree on how repellents work. So you have, in your day-to-day experience, you know that deepwoods off works really well. So insect repellents work incredibly well. there's still a lot of discussion in scientific circles about how they work, and the work from my lab and many others is trying to figure out how does deep work, and then once we know how it works, we could perhaps improve on it and come up with repellents that are longer-lasting and not as nasty to put on the skin. But believe it or not, it's still a huge scientific controversy 75 years later. Well, so 75 years, we know that it works, but we don't know exactly why it works. I can only imagine that if you were able to crack that code, you might be able to come up with a repellent that really, really, really works. That is the dream, exactly. That is the dream. And it's been, you know,

science sometimes is tricky. This has been a long, it's been a long road to figure out how it works. And many labs are still working on it. So there's repelling mosquitoes. We're still trying to solve a 75 year-long mystery about that. There's, you know, trying to eradicate them, something that obviously has its own unintended consequences, potentially. Are there other ideas about manipulating mosquito behavior other than what we've been talking about, you know, to put them on a diet. How else might we manipulate the way they just, they live and go feed? You know, the GMO approach can be used to kill mosquitoes.

There's also people thinking about GMO approaches just to change the behavior of the mosquitoes, like a science fiction cool idea. Could we make mosquitoes that lose interest in people and really specialize on animals? That would be another way of using modern CRISPR technology to change mosquito behavior. But again, these are such incredibly complicated public health problems that anybody that has an idea that would be willing to try it out. I think we would be all ears. Some of the mosquito-borne illnesses we're talking about that caused these gigantic public health problems like malaria, are they more difficult to prevent and manage than things like the flu? Such a complicated question.

I mean, because all of these diseases are so different, all of these different areas people are trying to. trying to raise vaccines. An effective vaccine exists for yellow fever, and yellow fever is very rarely seen. So I think it depends on which critter you're talking about. Malaria has been extremely difficult in every way to conquer because it's been very difficult to get a vaccine. But each of these diseases has its own unique problems, and flu was a problem, and all of the mosquito-borne diseases are a big problem. But we've gotten rid of malaria in the United States. It can be done. It can be done, and that was a huge coordinated public health effort that only succeeded in 1960. A lot of people think that malaria is not relevant to the U.S., but through most of the 20th century,

people in the southern U.S. were being sickened by malaria. So it can be done. You need to invest heavily in public health infrastructure and many other infrastructure issues. But we are a high-resourced country, so it's much. much easier to pull off in a high resource country. Well, thank you for keeping on this mosquito beat for us, Dr. Leslie Vossal, professor of neurobiology at the Rockefeller University here in New York City. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Now, when we come back, we're going to take a trip to the Grand Canyon. So grab your maps. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Later this month,

the Grand Canyon marks its 100th anniversary as a national park. And if you've ever been there, you know that it's, well, it's overwhelming. The canyon itself is over 270 miles long, and the park area covers some 1.2 million acres. But there is a way people can get a larger perspective on the natural wonder and how it came to be with Maps. Joining me now is Matthew Toro. He's Director of Maps, Imagery, and Geospatial Services at the ASU Libraries,

part of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. He's part of a team working to organize a comprehensive collection of maps dealing with the history, the geology, and the culture of the Grand Canyon. Matthew, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for being here. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me, John.

And if you've got questions about the Grand Canyon and great maps of it, 844-724-8255 or 844 Sci Talk, let's just start by talking about the maps in your collection. Give us some examples. Sure. Well, we have a selection of maps covering all sorts of thematic mapping activities

from topographic maps, geologic maps, fancifully illustrated pictorial maps. You know, those are the sorts of maps with cartoonish caricatures and whatnot, all the way to more modern GIS data-driven maps showing subjects as diverse as death in the Grand Canyon and other various data that could be displayed geographically for that region. So a whole bunch of different kinds of maps. Does your library own all these? No, no, not at all. We're actively trying to source all these sorts of maps, as you said, as comprehensively as possible, from multiple libraries. libraries, including the Library of Congress and other regional libraries here in the greater southwest.

And you're digitizing maps, so you've got them in digital form, you've got them on paper, all sorts of ways. Yeah. So a big aspiration of this research project is to kind of collect and compile and categorize and make sense of the sort of chronology of mapping activities of the region, but also to take a step further and geo-reference them and sort of add value to these often paper-based products, digitize them, turn them into pixels on a screen. and then assign them coordinates, you know, because they all correspond to the actual Grand Canyon,

assign them coordinates so that they can be used and interlaid with other data sets pertaining to the Grand Canyon. What's the oldest Grand Canyon map you have in this collection? Well, it's not a well-known map, but there is a fantastic map of the Northwest Fur Country published in 1836, or, excuse me, compiled, drawn in 1836, but not published for over a century. The actual publication, the book publication, it was published in, was from 1940. And it's by modern standards, an extremely crude map. As I said, it's a map of the Northwest for a country, so one wouldn't otherwise imagine that the Grand Canyon be included. But down on the southern tip of that map is a very crudely drawn depiction of what was then perceived as the Colorado River

and a very kind of crude depiction of two big barriers. on each side of this Colorado River suggesting and communicating to the map reader that you cannot cross here, and that's a really fantastic one. Basically, you're going to have to go around. This isn't going to work. And that's the reality as it is today, too.

I mean, those wishing to visit the Grand Canyon effectively have to drive all the way around it if they want to visit the North Rim. So there's the Navajo Bridge up there over towards Page in northwestern Arizona. So if you want to visit the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which only 10% of Grand Canyon visitors actually do, you really still have to do it the same way they did centuries ago.

Only 10%. I mean, when you say something like that, it makes me wonder just how much we actually know about the Grand Canyon. You can have hundreds and hundreds of maps, but how much do we really know about what it's like in there? That's what fascinates me most, John. So, you know, all of us talk about the Grand Canyon, like it's a matter of fact, but it really is an abstraction. And, you know, we can talk about the Grand Canyon as some singular unified entity, large regional entity, but it's really the work of maps that allow us to mentally abstract and make sense of this massive space. Because when you're in there, when you're down in the depths of the Grand Canyon at the Colorado River, you're a minute, you're a tiny little ant down there.

And so few of us, even from the rims, the North Rim or the South Rim, or even if you get into the depths of the Grand Canyon, we see tiny fragments of it. And that's not to mention the vast, vast western sections of the Grand Canyon that most humans have never even seen. There's such a difference between what we can do now, take digital photos, or take satellite imagery and piece something together. We may still not know what it really looks like down and there, but we have a pretty good sense. How are they making these maps hundreds of years ago?

How are they figuring out what the Grand Canyon looked like and writing it down and having it be something that somewhat resembles reality? Absolutely. That's what I respect most. I mean, we're talking about the middle of the 19th century. You know, some of the earliest explorers, Joseph Christmas Ives and his crew that started up the Colorado River by Steamboat, and then switched to an overland exploration of the Grand Canyon.

They produced some fantastic maps and are really gorgeous, but they were speculating on what the actual course of the Colorado River looked like. Jump about 10 or 11 years later to John Wesley Powell's famous 1869 first exploration through the entire course of the Colorado River, and that really started the era of modern mapping. And back then, they were using theodolites and barometric, or barometers to measure altitude and chronometers to kind of determine the, to determine latitude and longitude.

And really the same kind of mathematic principles that they were using back, you know, 150 years ago, you know, even the most modern satellites and our global positioning systems still fundamentally use the same principles of trigonometry, you know, trilateration, effectively determining measuring triangles and being able to create entire control survey control network. works to determine the locations of things. And then, you know, we have this entire legacy of building upon the sort of topographic base map with other kind of value-added bits of data. So geologic data and all the other types of data that could be collected for the Grand Canyon, from cultural resources, archaeological resources, et cetera, to land use land cover patterns,

vegetation, distributions, et cetera. If you want to join our conversation and you've got a question about maps or the Grand Canyon, Maybe you've been there and you understand just how vast it is, how maps could help. 844-724-8255 or 844-Sye talk as we talk with Matthew Toro, director of maps at ASU libraries. I want to go back to that 1858 map you talked about Joseph Christmas Ives. They started on a steamboat up the river and then they just went as far as they would, and then what did they do?

And that's right. So you have to remember this is right before the Civil War, the American Civil War. So it was actually a fantastic map that they ultimately produced. Yeah, they took their steamboat as far up the Colorado River as they could until it was no longer deemed navigable. They got off their steamboat called the Explorer. And then it was a massive overland trek. And up there on the southern rim, or the southern plateaus, if you will, on the south side of the Colorado River,

we're talking about traversing hundreds of miles of landscape. And one of the artists and cartographers they had on board was a gentleman by the name of Egleafstein, and he's kind of a renowned cartographer because he was one of the first to introduce kind of hill shading techniques in his depiction of three-dimensional landscapes of topography effectively. And, you know, so there's so many sorts of considerations to be made, not only aesthetic and representational, but also data-driven. So, you know, how do you first, how do you get the raw data? and then how do you actually go about depicting it and communicating what is there to the consumers, the map readers.

So, yeah, Overland Trek, and they didn't make it all the way through. So if you look at those 1858 maps, you see, I mean, these are some of the most gorgeous maps of the Grand Canyon you could find, but they're so grossly incorrect. So, I mean, for a large section of the Colorado River, it's purely speculative. But it looks, it's so well done. It's so beautifully done that it looks authoritative. And that's another side of this. You know, maps carry a certain authority, partly because of the history of mapmaking. It's often a government-based enterprise.

You know, we're seeing a transformation in mapping technologies, et cetera, that's sort of democratizing and bringing the power of cartography to individuals rather than, you know, large nation-states or other sorts of powerful political economic actors. But because of that, because of the... authority maps convey, you know, people view them as factual, even though they can sometimes be grossly inaccurate. Well, and I want to ask you about that. I do want to tell our listeners that if you want to take a look at some of these maps we're

talking about, it's ScienceFriday.com slash maps, and there's so much interesting stuff in there. What is the value of the map that has a gross misrepresentation or sort of some version of, you know, here be dragons, right? We don't really know what's there, but we're just going to put something on the map. Anyway, what's the real value historically of that? Well, you know, there's an entire legacy here. In this era, you know, especially for the Grand Canyon,

we're talking about an era where this region of northwestern Arizona was depicted on maps as this conspicuous blank space because all the official government maps only wanted to portray the most reliable data. And the fact of the matter was that there was no reliable topographic data of what was there or hydrographic data, what was the course of the river? So, yeah, one can argue, well, you know, these things are worthless. But with every iteration, with every sort of generation of these kind of pioneering topographic surveys,

they incrementally built their knowledge of what indeed was there. And like I was saying earlier, it was really John Wesley Powell's initial 1869 and subsequent 1871,72 exploration of the Colorado River, that firstly, most importantly, corrected the course of, of, of the Colorado River. And it also coincided, not coincidentally, with the development or the creation of the United States Geological Survey, which of course is our countries,

the United States kind of mapping agencies. So here we have kind of the predecessor, and this was one of four large Western surveys that were ultimately assembled and compiled to create the United States Geological Survey. So maybe one could argue, yeah, these match are, effectively worthless, but for the explorers and the frontiers people of the time, any sort of geographic knowledge is better than none, right?

Well, absolutely. We've got some calls coming in, too. Gary is in Salt Lake City, Utah, not that terribly far from the canyon. Hi there, Gary. You're on Science Friday. Hello. I had a question about raised relief maps. I own a few, and normally they protrude out, you know, 3D out of the map.

How would they make one to go in with the canyon? And also, how do they make them? How do they even make these maps? That's a great question. Matthew? Yeah, I can give some basics. I'm no expert on raised relief maps, but it's effectively taking the raw topographic data.

So, you know, these raised relief maps often are reproductions of United States Geological Survey topographic map series. And those come in multiple scales. The most common scales are currently the one to 24,000. series, but there's also the 1 to 62,500 series, which are approximately 15 minutes latitude by 15 minute longitude. And so they basically take these series of USGS base maps, and they warp them and reproduce them effectively in plastic.

And so I'm more familiar with the more digital processes. I'm not familiar with the specific processes involved with the plastic razor relief maps, which are fantastic. I love them, and I have several of them myself. But, yes, so, I mean, it's effectively taking those values of elevation these days. In the modern era, we have what's called a DEM or a digital elevation model. So this is effectively a series of pixels where each pixel has a value of elevation. And with a few tricks of a GIS, a geographic information system software, you basically extrude those values of elevation.

So getting back to the more traditional raised relief plastic maps, you're basically taking topographic data, which is typically represented by isometric contour lines, you know, where, you know, when the contour lines are closer together, that's indicating that there's a very steep relief, right? And when they're farther apart, that's, that's, you know, communicating that it's relatively a flat slope. And so taking those, and again, this is the real point. This is my interest here. All of that is data that's actually encapsulated embodied, either on a piece of paper or on a plastic

raised relief map or in some sort of database. and effectively taking those data, and again, I don't know the process for the raised relief maps, but taking those data and extruding them. So digital methods are different these days, but that's the fundamental process. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And we're talking about maps and mapping the Grand Canyon. I should ask, there were people obviously living around the Grand Canyon region long before Europeans saw it. Did they have any maps that you found?

That's a great question, and I get asked it a lot, especially, you know, the sort of initial impetus for this project was a fantastic grant that myself and a small research team that I assembled, one through the Arizona State University Institute through Humanities, or Institute for Humanities Research Institute, excuse me. And so, yeah, you know, from a humanities perspective, we need to be cognizant and sensitive to those who preceded the sort of Anglo or, you know, white European, you know, centric views of mapping space. So I get asked this question a lot. And, and Unfortunately, I always have to respond with no. To our knowledge, there are no extant Native American representations of space the way we sort of modern Americans or modern Westerners think of depictions of space.

And there's many reasons for this. I'm no expert with indigenous mappings. But, I mean, the simplest, of course, is that for people living in the area, some sort of top-down, alic, you know, here's the view of space from sort of, you know, bird's-eye view. that wasn't really needed for people who intimately know landmarks and landscapes and intimately know the course of the river. There's no real need to sort of colonize or imperialize and depict this space for effectively controlling it. And that's unfortunately and realistically for long sections of history why maps were produced, you know, for controlling space. We got a tweet from Michael who asks, what is the least map-like map in your collection? Huh, that's a fascinating question.

The least map-like map. I guess it depends on how you define what a map is. Yeah, and I'd say a map is something I can use to plot my course. You know, I want to make sure I get the right place and the right time, but I'm quite sure there are some in your collection that are a bit more cartoony, a little less specific. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, so, you know, modern humans, we often think of the map as what we carry around

in our smartphone that's used primarily for navigation. But, yeah, some of the most fantastical maps, if you will, are some of the most, of those cartoonish pictorial maps. And those, there's a whole kind of era of mostly automobile and gasoline company maps that were produced to effectively promote automobile tourism. You know, you have a rising middle class. This is a couple decades after the sort of Fordist model of growing the middle class and more people are owning automobiles, more people have disposable income. And the United States has recently grown. So we're talking about, you know, the basically 1920s to 1950s, and a lot of these maps produced by, you know, AAA or automobile companies or petroleum

companies are producing these maps, encouraging people to go out and drive, and on these maps are, you know, fanciful kind of cartoons of the various sorts of characters and scenes that you could find, and they're fantastic to look at, really interesting maps, and maybe not, you know, the best for navigation, but definitely interesting for kind of delving into the various stories of these places. You mentioned fanciful depictions. We've been having this discussion online and also in the Science Friday studios here.

Are maps art to you? Because I look at them and I see something that's fantastically beautiful, but some people just say, well, it's a tool. It's not really art. No, I would, without questions, say maps or art. And I think that's why people universally love maps. You know, one need not be a geographer

or an applied cartographer or one of the other usual suspects of map makers or map consumers, you know, geologists, architects, etc., to love maps. And I think the reason we do love them is because they are art. You know, in my home, I've recently visited the Miami International Map Fair in Miami, Florida, and it's this giant map fair, and people are buying maps,

and often they're putting them in their home as decoration, because that's what they are. Well, we've got to leave now, but Matthew Toro, director of maps at ASU libraries, thank you so much. If you want to see some of these maps, visit ScienceFriday.com slash maps. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski, sitting in for Ira Flato. We're going to talk about a piece of technology now that you might overlook, but it's everywhere. You use it to turn on the lights, to communicate with coworkers, even order a meal.

I'm talking about the humble button, that tiny piece of tech that you use to interact with almost everything. But a button is not just a button. You've heard the phrase pushing my buttons or hot button issues. What about the big red doomsday button? And today we click and we swipe with a new kind of button. Why do we have all these feelings about buttons? Where do they come from in the first place?

and what do they tell us about our relationship with technology? My next guest is here to talk with us about this. Rachel Plotnick is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, and she's the author of the book Power Button, A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. Rachel, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. And if you've got a pressing button question, how they work or why we need them, or a story about a button mishap.

You can call us at 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sy-Talk or tweet us. at SciFry. Why'd you get interested in buttons? You know, I sort of stumbled across it as many. I think academics do find their way to these strange topics. I was really interested in questions of remote control and who gets to hold the television remote, all of the power dynamics around that.

And the more I began looking at remote controls, the more I realized that the buttons on the remotes were really interesting. And as I looked around the world, I saw, wow, there are buttons everywhere to do everything and interact with every form of technology, communication, play, work. And I just began to wonder, how did we become this society that is so essentially transfixed with pushing buttons? Did buttons really come about when we first started electrifying everything? Is that really when buttons took hold? You know, it's a funny question because we could think of buttons in many different ways. Of course, we all have belly buttons. We could think about the clothing buttons that keep our clothes attached to us.

But pushing a button really did come about in the 19th century around the time of industrialization and electrification as people began to think about what's the most, efficient and satisfying way to carry out an act with electricity. So I would kind of isolate that moment as when people really began thinking about this idea of pushing a button. Is it about making the untouchable, touchable somehow of harnessing electricity with just a simple, you know, simple finger? That was definitely a big part of it, yes. I think at this period in time, you know, most homes at the late 19th century didn't

have electrification. So the idea of, you know, even interacting with electricity on a daily basis was very threatening or intimidating. and buttons provided this really safe kind of unintimidating face to interact with whether that was a light switch or a bell or these other kinds of technologies. So if you could put that simple interface or face in front of it and say, all you have to do is push a button, then people didn't have to be worried about getting electrocuted or wondering what was going to happen with electricity. It's kind of hard for us to imagine, but pushing a button wasn't really easy for the first generation button pushers, as you call them. What were some of the mishaps?

I mean, I'm sure engineers had a really hard time convincing people to push buttons or to show people how these things are supposed to work. Yeah, I uncovered so many interesting stories about these button mishaps, and probably we have just as many of these stories today as well. But people would talk about pushing the button and nothing would happen at all, and they would just wonder, does the button even work? Of course, there were those rare stories of people getting injured from pushing buttons or just various miscommunications that would happen around pushing a button that would just trigger bells all over one's household. They're all over a factory and you couldn't get them to stop. And so I think there was a lot of question around, are these actually really as efficient and satisfying as a form of interaction as we think they should be? And that's often why children were the first to use buttons, even in schools,

because they thought, hey, let's introduce them to children, teach them how to use them, then everybody else maybe will too. It's sort of like now a child picks up an iPad and knows what to do with it. Maybe somebody who didn't grow up with an iPad doesn't know how to do it. But they actually had designs to keep boys from pushing buttons back in the day because, well, boys like to push buttons back then, and they would hold them down and cause those just a problem. What did those buttons look like? Yes, those were some of the funniest stories to me were just people complaining about children pushing buttons,

you know, honking automobile horns or running up to people's doors and ringing doorbells just to see what would happen. And I think that was really this funny dichotomy that I uncovered was, on the one hand, hey, let's introduce children to push buttons. They can kind of be our guinea pigs as the first generation of button pushers. And on the other hand, oh, no, all these children are run around pushing buttons. What are we going to do with them? So I think so easy a child can push a button became this really kind of complicated slogan when we saw what children actually did with buttons.

And there were early on there were good button designs and there were poor button designs. What were some of the less successful designs? Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about button technologies at this time period was buttons could be made out of so many different things. So I mentioned school before and children could make buttons out of wood or very inexpensive. technologies and the same thing for early button manufacturers. People talked about switches that didn't work very well, whether they didn't conduct electricity well, or they would just fall apart or break and you couldn't repair them easily. So I think there was a lot of talk about how do we make a

button that functions effectively and is also cost effective. There's a lot of really interesting sociology in your book. And especially in the 19th century, buttons were showing up in the homes of wealthy families and they were replacing bells. And this changed in a lot of lot of ways, their interactions with, I suppose, the help. Absolutely. That was one of the most interesting dynamics I studied and kind of learned about was that, you know, you'd have wealthy homeowners, especially housewives in their houses, who would affix buttons to the bottom of their dining room tables or at their bed sides and they would use them

to call servants. And this replaced earlier belt technologies like bell poles where you would pull a really heavy handle to get the bell to ring. But there were lots of problematic dynamics between housewives pushing buttons and then servants responding to them. So a lot of times servants would just pretend they didn't hear the button and not actually react. They'd say, oh, the button didn't work. I didn't hear that. You know, it's kind of a subversive way of resisting being called in that way. So I think many servants didn't like this idea of being treated at one's beck and call that they were just supposed to

magically appear anytime someone pushed a button. It's still kind of, though, how we think about buttons, right? I mean, we still press a button and we expect something to happen. It's a vending machine or it's, I don't know, it's an app on your phone that sends a car to come get you. that really hasn't changed after all these years. It really hasn't. That was a tremendous revelation to me was just that buttons have always really been caught up in this idea of instant gratification, you know, pushing for your pleasure. And I think it's that idea of cause and effect.

I push the button and then I'm gratified by getting whatever that thing or person is that I want has been one of the most seductive elements of push buttons. You also write a lot about the dynamics in the workplace and not the domestic workplace, but in the factory, in the shop, that you ended up having two different types of workers, people who were button pushers and people who then did stuff because people were pushing buttons. And that was a difficult dynamic. Exactly. I sort of identify that as what I call the difference or the stratification between manual labors and digital laborers.

And manual laborers were people who actually had to use their hands and respond whenever a high-level boss would call them, you know, a push-button manager. And then the push-button manager became these kind of digital laborers because they would literally, with their digits, just push the button. and call people to their desks. And there were constant complaints about this notion that I'm being abused, I'm being treated badly by having to just show up anytime someone calls me to push a button, you're just sitting there without getting your hands dirty while I'm doing all the work and responding every time you push the button. A lot of people are pushing buttons and trying to call us to join the conversation.

So let's join Eric right now. Eric is in Rochester, New York. Hi, there, Eric. Hello. Hi, what's your thought? One of the, my favorite myths, I served on the elevator board in the city that I live in for a number of years, and things got, terms got tossed around. And my favorite one is elevator buttonitis. And it's the mistaken belief that by pushing the button to bring the elevator more times than one, it will come faster.

So people believe that if you. how it works. So people believe that if you press it a whole bunch of times, it'll start to come faster. You just press it once. That's all you need, right? That's all you need. That's not, that's not the mechanics and the electronics of elevators don't work to be pushed a number of times to make it come faster. Okay, Eric, there's another myth, though, I want to clear up since you were on the elevator board for your city. So I get inside the elevator and there's the button that says, I can close the door, I can open the door. Do those buttons actually work? They do a little bit.

A lot of elevators are timed, and I think that's becoming more and more important with handicap access so that people have enough time to get on and off. And they can be programmed in to be shorter. But I think, generally speaking, they do work some. Eric, well, thank you so much for the phone call. I'm glad you raised this very important point because, Rachel, I wanted to get to this. I mean, the elevator button is a really big one. Yeah, it's one of the most fascinating and fun buttons to talk about.

I think people always have stories about elevator buttons. And Eric's comment, I think, speaks to that very idea of what people often call the placebo button, you know, this idea that we want to push the button whether or not we know that it actually does anything. And the same kind of applies to crosswalk buttons on streets. You know, New York City tried to eliminate crosswalk buttons. People got really angry about it. So I think there's this kind of user agency component here where we want to feel in control

of our technologies, even though there might be a computer behind the scenes. it's actually controlling what that button does. But that user agency, that's a big part of the story of buttons. I mean, even if the button doesn't do anything, you're feeling like you're doing something. And that's something that we've learned over, you know, this century plus of pushing buttons all the time. We expect something to happen. So we want that control, right? Absolutely.

You know, it's a really potent control mechanism, a push button, because it does seem like it provides that kind of control. But I think that's also what provokes anxiety and makes people feel sometimes like they're not in control is when the button doesn't do what you expected to do, or you're not really sure what the effects will be. So it kind of is a double-edged sword in that way that we want that sense of mastery and control, but we also sometimes recognize that pushing a button may not actually give us a desired effect.

So you were talking about early buttons that could be made out of wood. Of course, now we have all these different types of digital buttons that are designed different ways. And we're not always just pushing them. We're swiping left and swiping right. Have we learned how to design a better button for humans? I think buttons in many ways have gotten much more complicated because if you think about the buttons you use now digitally or on touchscreens, quite often you have to hold down the button and then that will give you a menu of different choices or you can click left or write on a button and it produces different functions.

So in many ways we don't have that binary that we used to where it's either just on or off or stop or start. You have to really understand all the different conditions that are involved with pushing buttons. And that may be one of the reasons why we see more and more designs moving away from buttons is because in some ways, they've gotten more complex as they've also gotten simpler. Doug actually tweets at us something that I was interested in. Yes, are buttons with physical tactile feedback more popular than touchscreen buttons with or without this kind of feedback? What do you know about that?

Because I know with my new smartphone, I like it when it gives me a little buzz or when it makes a little ding. I want to feel something or hear something. Absolutely. I think people really desire feedback from their push button interactions, whether that's some kind of haptic feedback like the vibration or, you know, something like that. lights up or gives you some kind of cue, we need transparency with our buttons, and I think that that's what makes them a lot more usable. And when people don't have those kinds of cues,

that's when that feeling of lack of user agency really comes into play. We're talking about buttons, and the book is Power Button, a history of pleasure, panic, and the politics of pushing. And we're talking with Rachel Plotnick. I'm John Dankowski. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Of course, we've been talking about buttons that do things for us, but there's this fear of buttons, including the big red disaster button. How did this fear come about? It's so interesting that we've been talking about a fear of push button warfare since the 19th century. You know, people always imagine what would happen if there was this one big red button that we could push that would blow up the world.

I really became interested in some of the early prophecies. Some people talked about Thomas Edison, you know, because, of course, he was a major figure in electrification in the 19th century as becoming too powerful. And if he decided one day he just wanted to blow up a country at a whim, he would just do that by pushing a button. And a lot of people talked about push button warfare is representing the end of civilization because it took away kind of the intimacy and closeness of taking someone's life

and instead doing it at a remove and with a push. So we tend to think of push button warfare as having to do with the Cold War, but in fact people have been worried about that for a really long time. It's so interesting. I just always assumed it did correlate with the Cold War that it must have come along sometime, you know,

around nuclear weapons, Dr. Strange Love and all that. That feels to me like when the big red button came into consciousness. I think definitely that was a moment of moral panic. And I've done a lot of research over just kind of tracing that phrase, push button warfare in popular newspapers over time. And you see a massive spike around the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s around that phrase. So yes, that was definitely a really iconic moment.

But on the other hand, you had many things happening around the death penalty by electrification and issues about, you know, sort of doing everything by button in the 19th century. So people were already worried about that next theoretically logical step where, okay, we've done all these other things by button is warfare coming next. I want to get to another consumer question here. Manuel is calling from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Hi there. You're on Science Friday. Yeah, hi. I'm calling when I was young.

My father had an old car and it had a push button transmission. And I'm just wondering why that never caught on and became a real thing. It's such a good question. What do you know about that, Rachel? Yeah, I looked a lot at kind of early push buttons on automobiles and, you know, from starters and transmissions to different things. It's interesting that in the history of automobiles, buttons were originally introduced to try to encourage women to drive. Women were supposed to be frail. They didn't want to get dirty theoretically, right?

So the idea was, oh, let's just give women a button. Then they'll want to drive their automobiles. So I think there's always been something associated with driving and this kind of ease of use around push buttons, especially around this kind of female. subject. I'm not sure exactly why it didn't catch on with automobile transmission specifically, but it is interesting to see how push-button designs come and go with driving. You know, they've sort of went away for a long time, and now that's back as being very en vogue. Another question here from Roger in Madison, Alabama. Hi there, Roger. Go ahead. Hi, I'm wondering why the flip switch won the war of turning lights on and off in most houses, and I have a theory about it.

Oh, you have a theory about it. Very quickly, what's your theory? I think it's because people have packages in their arms and they can flip it with their elbow. Ah, they can flip it with their elbow. It's such a good question. Now, I've been in old houses, Rachel, where they still have the old push button to turn on and off the light. But he's right. You know, the flip switch won that battle. Why?

Yeah, it's a great question. So, yes, originally light switches were push buttons. You'd have the white button for light and the black button for dark or off. And it took a while, really, for these toggle or lever switches to catch on that we use today. wasn't until about 1915 that you saw patents for those switches. And that's because people were really experimenting with doing everything by button before that. I think that elbow theory is definitely part of it. People talked about wanting to be able to keep their hands free, and that lever allowed you to do that, of course. So I think that was part of it. The other thing is that push buttons

that are embedded in surfaces like that were often very difficult to repair. They'd get dusty, or there were problems with extracting them from the wall. So it often became more expensive and more difficult to repair them. So that was another reason that toggle switches became more popular. Last quick question for you, there was this incident in Hawaii that someone accidentally tweeted out a missile warning because of accidental button pressing. What are we doing as far as safeguards for our buttons? Because it could be so easy to set off a real disaster. I think that's a great question. You know, and that's where it gets to the problem of buttons can be on the one hand very complex, but on the other hand, often too simple. And I think we have major anxiety about that of what

if the wrong person stumbles across this button and carries out some action that we don't want them to. So this question of safety is a really interesting one. You know, even in the 19th century where we're putting buttons behind glass and saying, okay, only push in case of emergency, you know, or the fire alarm button and these kinds of things. So there is that tension between trying to make buttons easy to use, but also opening them up to all these kinds of vulnerabilities that people will do the wrong thing with them. It's a fascinating history. Rachel Plotnick is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University

in Bloomington. Her book is Power Button, The History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. Thanks so much, Rachel. Thank you. You can read an excerpt of the book at our website, ScienceFriad.com slash button. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. And if you missed any part of the program, we'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcast. You can always say hi to us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or email us SciFri at Science Friday.com. Thanks to the whole crew here for taking such good care of me the last few weeks. Ira is back next week. In New York, I'm John Donkoski.