Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocJade | Hacker News Reader

There's really so much physicality to interacting with objects that we've lost as we switch to more and more touch screens and capacitive buttons. Also the reassuring "thunk" of a nice chunky button to confirm you've pressed it is just so important to user confidence

View on HN

Check out this chunky industrial Bakelite switch with a resonant thunking spring clicking action that you have to overshoot each of the four rotations by 45 degrees before it clicks. It feels so good, it's nice to just turn around and around just for pure audio and kinesthetic pleasure. So much better than a Tesla iPad control. (Never mind the gorilla!)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o_n5W2I2p_M

It's from the Amsterdam Bakelite Collection, founded/curated by Reindert Groot. It isn't actually a museum you can visit at this moment, but it's a huge beautiful collection, with lots of interesting photos and articles and newsletters online, and parts of it surface in museums around the world from time to time.

http://www.amsterdambakelitecollection.com/

There are some beautiful photos in the newsletters, like the colossal steel 1500 Kg two-part injection mold, and the restored SAAL Soft SPEAKER with the Bakelite Bell:

http://www.amsterdambakelitecollection.com/newsletter202411/...

Other interesting Bakelite links from previous Hacker News discussions:

1956 Philips 353A Bakelite Vacuum Tube Radio Repair & Restoration

https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/2022/09/06/1956-philips-3...

Bakelite to the Future - 1950s rotary phone ESP32 bluetooth headset

https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...

That restoration work on the speaker and the paper box is so well done. I spent some time under the Rijksmuseum in the workshops and the people there are similarly skilled and it was very impressive to see them at work, infinite patience and the result of all that work as invisible as possible. That's the bit that really got me, good restorers don't have any fingerprints, their biggest successes are the works that look like they were never worked on in the first place. Which is almost the opposite of every other form of creative art, and yet, they are amongst the best in the field.

That transformer from last link about the phone looks like it was made yesterday.

These physical controls do still exist, where it absolutely has to work. I took a photo of a pretty nice physical control panel at a fairly new ride at Disneyland recently. The modularity and tactile oversized buttons and switches were really cool. I built an art car for Burning Man and used similar industrial controls, they look cool and are really rugged.

Don't worry, now we're about to completely lose touch too: Now you'll just talk to an AI and take its word for having done what you wanted :)

The photos on that article are nice inspiration for some pseudo-steampunk/vacuumpunk stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com