[buttons] honked automobile horns, and called for service in hotels and well-to-do dining rooms; they made elevators appear at a whim, and put photography within reach of the masses. Prefiguring the present-day internet age, one author in 1895 imagined an ‘ideal future when life shall consist of sitting in a chair and pressing buttons’. The act of pushing a button signified comfort, convenience and control, the heady values of industrialisation, much as it could also represent slothfulness, deskilling or alienation.