When the push button was new, people were freaked

Your door example raises further questions. When I pick up a remote control, the control moves just as easily as my hand. Does the remote become an equal part of me immediately?

But perhaps he does not care about the far future as much.

> ... they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant

By claiming he doesn't notice something that he clearly and explicitly mentions, I feel you are directly making his point.

Two days ago we returned home from a short trip and when we turned on the tap for the first time the water pressure seemed unusually high for 5-10 seconds before returning to normal. I would have thought nothing of it except that about fifteen years ago I had experienced the same phenomenon after installing a water pressure booster pump in our house and so I learned the hard way about the need for thermal expansion tanks in modern domestic plumbing [1] and so I knew right away that our tank had failed and needed to be replaced. It's a pretty trivial DIY project, but only if you do it before your pipes burst. I suspect most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion tank.

[1] https://homeinspectioninsider.com/thermal-expansion-tanks-in...

Broadly, the reason for why some 20th C. kids would have had access to less information is that they were more protected from dangers than those in 19th C. (and in some ways that's problematic when it comes to learning). Also, clearly, the types of information available in each era would have been different—and this difference would have been accentuated depending on which part of each century we're referring to.

The 19th C.—being the height of the Industrial Revolution—change came thick and fast, so it's almost superfluous to say kids' knowledge of electricity at the turn of the 20th C. would have been much greater than at the beginning of the 19th however this difference wasn't anywhere near as stark at other times throughout the 19th C.

This is best illustrated by example and for that I'll use a book published in 1858 by Elisha Noyce titled The Boys Book of Industrial Information. https://archive.org/details/boysbookofindust00noyc

So by 1858 enough information was known about electricity to include technical aspects about it including its industrial applications such as electroplating, p129, and the telegraph, pp273-280 in a kids' book. I'd also posit that some 20 years later (by say 1880) with the coming together of electrical engineering—telephone, electric motors, generators, transatlantic cables, theory by Maxwell, Wheatstone et al, that much more information about the subject would have been available to kids.

Noyce's book was a true eye-opener to me when I came across it some two to three decades ago, so much so that I now truly regret not having a copy of it as a kid. I know I would have gained a great amount of useful knowledge from it despite the fact that it was published a century before my time.

Whilst I had access to more modern texts they didn't provide the information in such a useful and meaningful way. Moreover, much of that information is still very relevant and valuable today. For instance, I refer you to pp57-58 on the dangers of lead and lead poisoning, therein Noyce issues a stark warning especially so with respect to white lead as used in paint.

(This advice would have been invaluable to boys who would have gone into industries where they'd be exposed to such dangers. It also infomes us that knowledge of and concerns about bad and dangerous working conditions of the era may have been better understood at the time than some modern history books would have us believe.)

Keep in mind this warning was in a book for boys written to provide them with practical and useful information—not published in some erudite scientific publication. The fact that by 1858 the dangers of lead had filtered down not only to ordinary people but also to their kids makes the failure of governments and those knowledgeable of the facts to act in a decisive way over the forthcoming century all the more tragic (when I first read Noyce's warning I was quite horrified that so little action had been taken until recent decades).

As you see, with actual information to hand things seem a little more nuanced.

I well understand what you say having lived in a crowded part of Europe for a time. It made me all the more appreciative of the fact that I grew up in a big home with a large front and back yard and that our house was only a few hundred metres from bushland.

Nevertheless, in some ways I envy you living in the Côte d’Azur. That is one of my most favorite parts of Europe.

And of course, the bell doesn't have to make much sense. It doesn't have to work better than yelling, if the kids just like having it around.

Well, practically so. My mother had a massive copper (I think) cowbell at the bottom of the stairs to signal us. All it required was the muscle energy to give the 2-kilogram monstrosity a little shake.

You're right, encouraging kids to explore the world at an early age is all important for their development. As a kid I was a past master at pulling all sorts of things apart and somewhat less successful at putting them back together again. And from that I learned a great amount about how stuff worked ('hands-on' at a very young age I reckon is essential to get the feel and measure of stuff).

My parents never discouraged me from playing with all sorts of rather strange things—except perhaps in my preschool years when I started rummaging around amongst the inner workings of our large console radio set in the lounge room. At the age of about four or five my mother took exception after I discovered that touching the top cap [aka grid-1] of one of its valves (tubes) caused a very loud humming noise (she came bounding into the room somewhat alarmed to find No.-1 son arm-deep amongst the electrics).

By that age I'd already become an inveterate collector of junk—everything from screws, nuts and bolts to discarded power pole wire and insulators.

Once I found an old transformer out of a radio set that had green silk-like insulation on its windings (which I found fascinating) and in the evening when my parents told me to stop playing with it I disobeyed the order and hid it in my bed (I know, a very strange kid). Now, you can imagine the furore and trouble I was in when this large metal object came crashing to the floor in the early hours of the morning waking up the whole household.

I cannot envisage how horrible my childhood would have been had my parents forbidden me from following my natural instincts (as strange and as odd as they may have seemed).

I'm sure many other parents would have been much less tolerant of my strange predilections. In hindsight, I reckon my only saving grace was that my father was an engineer.

[0] https://youtu.be/RrsL2n9q6d0?t=797

They also made them do it standing up with an awkwardly shaped bulb, and only a single wire, so the task was basically impossible, without a cutter and/or some tape.

Still, people should know why they are failing.

Of course, they are being caught out of context and are guessing the "rules" of the "game".

https://www.pritzkerlaw.com/ecoli-lawyer/e-coli-lawsuit-5-re... for one example of many.

> At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life.

> Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.”

The new concept was power amplification: a small effort causing a larger than "natural" effect.

E.g. you were always able to press a button to tinkle a bell, but pressing a button and obtaining a sustained electrical ringing was new.

Valves and transistors took it to the present stage, by cascading the effect of small inputs switching larger amounts of power from an external supply.

(Yes, power amplification could be done mechanically before electricity with energy from water, weights, etc. but it was too cumbersome.)

Google Translate is not a very complete dictionary. You can find many more definitions in Trésor de la langue française informatisé :

https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bouton

It means “projection” in the sense of ”bit that sticks out,” like its use in goldsmithing or for the foot at the bottom of a harp.

Related definition from Google: "A thing that extends outward from something else: 'the particle board covered all the sharp projections'"

Synonyms: protuberance, protrusion, sticking-out bit, overhang, prominence, spur, outcrop, outgrowth, jut, bulge, jag...

And obviously, projection can be a noun in its probably most common usage as in "an estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on study of present ones". In the phrase, "this is the projection of where the hurricane will go", "the projection" is a noun. The verb in this phrase is "is", a linking verb.

"Wall Street bankers crafted a projection of the market." The verb here is "crafted". What did they craft: a projection. A noun.

"I watch the projection on the screen." - The verb here is watch. What am I watching: the projection. A noun.

The article also treats all physical-control analogies as bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons that instantly told you

A. This is a button. B. The button is "pressed."

At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the real world. In the real world (even one full of touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you press on something malleable it will deform, and the light and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been pressed.

This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means ON! Brown means OFF!

There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's ineffective (or less effective).

Conclusion: Windows 95 nailed it.