Buttons Not Buttons
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You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC. Rewind.

How did you even get onto... I feel like buttons has just become a fixture. How did this happen? Who's to blame for this? Let me start. I'm going to start. This is reporter Latif Nasser, and today on Radiolab, 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. But you found one. Except Robert Kralovich. I'll go to anything. Exactly.

Jamie told me never to stop recording, but I didn't know how. So we go to Long Island City. Walk around. You think it's that door right there? First of all, we 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 taxi signs. And we have no interest in taxis. Do you know if there's a museum in here? We found some guy on the street. Yes, there is. Um...

Thank you very much. Aha, wow, that's quite a sign. Elevator Museum, founded 2011.

By Patrick Carson. So we open up the door. Wow. We have no idea what's going to be on the other side of this. Not a thing. Hello? Whoa. This is different from what I can... And? It's a large room. It's a world. Are you building up to something, I hope? It's filled with... What is it? Stuff. Elevator matchbook here.

Here are these giant paintings of escalators and moving sidewalks. And sitting in the corner 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 the mood, they'll get a song. Patrick has been the lead singer in a number of bands, and he even studied constitutional law. This is a man for all seasons. He's got so much elevator stuff. I've been collecting since I was 11 years old. Because when you were 7 years old, you walked into an elevator and had a...

And as we're walking along... Oh, that's 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 classy. There's a silver up and down.

He has all kinds of antique buttons that, I mean, from just different eras. Here's one where you go... So this is the genesis right there. Right here 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 button, you know, where you push and the door's supposed to close.

He says, just says, matter of fact, he says, about 80% of them are non-functional. Oh, wow. What? Because they are broken and no one fixed them? Because they were 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 work? I assume they don't work. All the time? Yeah. I thought, no, no, no, no. Of course it doesn't work. No, this cannot be right. What do you mean it cannot be right?

What do you mean it cannot be right? Have you ever pushed a close button that has had any effect on the door? It's just a psychological tool for you. You need the button to go bang, bang, bang. You've got to push something. But he had also a very fancy reason. What was his fancy reason? They're extremely intelligent elevators. The elevators actually remember what happens every day. So the elevator system knows that between...

8.55 and 9 o'clock, we get 373 people on an average morning coming in. So we're going to return two cars to the main floor as soon as we possibly can. We're not going to park anything 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 whole. So all you're doing is screwing up our timing by touching that.

I mean, you have thousands and thousands of people anxiously trying to urge the machine to do their will. We like watching people just keep pressing a stupid button and not knowing...

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. How could you be sympathetic? You were 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 empowerment. You're insane. So we then began looking around for some little soupçon of hope to give the Radiolab listeners.

Some tiny bit of power that they could have back in this otherly fascistic system. And you know, Jad, we found it. You did. We did. What did you find? We have hacked the close button. Really? Wait. Now I'm suddenly interested. For the first time, I am interested. What did you discover? The next time, Jad, 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.

Six endless seconds will roll by, leaving you powerless and hapless, but not anymore. Now here's what you can do. And we checked 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. Whoa. That will shave an amazing three, four, even five seconds off your waiting time. All right. And it will give you that sense of being Superman. Yeah. That's 45 minutes of your life back. 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 Gwinnett.

What is it? Button Gwinnett. 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 Gwinnett? Button Gwinnett 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've 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 Gwinnett 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 a import-export. He bought an island? Yep, St. Catherine's Island. Truth is, he leased it, but whatever. So he's like just a wealthy guy? No, Button Gwinnett was a serial debtor, actually, and he owed everybody money. So he failed in his business, and he...

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 and is 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 the Gwinnetts pass into history. Yes. 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 his 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 the Declaration of 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 Gwinnett signatures were almost impossible to find. And even now, like a hundred and some odd 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 and a wall begins to rise. And I'm like, what the hell?

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 Gwinnett is like the centerpiece of this secret wall that raises up. And I go, oh, my goodness, you've got a Button Gwinnett. It was pretty amazing. 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. 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. A hundred times more than Abe Lincoln. Really? What about George Washington? Yep. Ben Franklin? Yes. Yes. Buttons, Lynette, Outshells...

I would say 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. Bobby Livingston told us with the exception, possible exception of William Shakespeare, this guy, Button Gwinnett,

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

Hello, sir. Hello, sir. How are you doing? Good. Okay, you checked your bags and everything? So it turns out that there are four button Gwinnett's at the New York Public Library. Which is right in our neighborhood. Closed? I believe the reading room is still closed, 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 a guy named Thomas Lannan. I work in the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York 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 him on the wood, I think.

We're standing at a wooden, like a kind of beautiful old wooden table, and we have... On the table? Four button Gwinnett's. Four. Wait, hold on, just so I can appreciate. Tell me what 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'm not in the business of estimating value of things, but I can say that Button Gwinnett autographs at the New York Public Library are classified as splendid. Highest ranking, splendid? They're not simply cut autographs. They're documents signed. Look at this. Look at this. This is the most extravagant one. Oh.

Wow, but it has like seals on it, like red wax seals. There might have been like $4 million sitting on that table. We got $4 million. So for me, the impulse I'm having right here is not just putting these in my pocket and running away. Like the impulse I'm having, and I'm being totally frank here, is the same impulse I have like, you know, when you want to pull the fire alarm. Like I just want to just tear these all up right now. Really? Kind of. That's right.

I just wanted to take all of these papers that were on this table and just tear them all to shreds. I can't speak to your desire to destroy history. And then the guy really looked alarmed. But you don't really want to tear these up, you have to admit. It's just so valuable. Like, it's so arbitrarily valuable. Like, I could just rip it up. Like, how could it be that valuable if I could 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 Jad Abumrad. Today on the podcast, Latif Nasser and Robert Krawitsch.

are talking buttons. So we have one more button tale. In a way, this sort of, once we were onto buttons, this sort of presented itself because it is the most high stakes button ever. Yeah. Mr. President, we have a crisis situation at 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 Titan missile? No.

Is it a button? I mean, it's depicted in Hollywood as a big red button. Exactly. So we just figured, okay, let's go find the button that destroys the world. 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. 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, there's all this literature about the,

The crazy scientist who invents 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... This 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 really surprised us. He said when the U.S. government dropped those first bombs on Japan... So...

The bomb that they drop on 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 en route, opened up the bomb, put the missing piece back into it, and then closed it 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 to 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 buttons,

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 could drop them on Hiroshima. You could drop them on Nagasaki. You can drop them on Kokura. And you could drop them on Niigata. Basically, he says, any day after August 3rd, feel free to drop the bomb. What? What?

He said, "Here's a couple of different options. Choose?" Choose. Here's some bombs, here's some cities, 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 city rather for Hiroshima. But 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 they they they bombed Nagasaki. But so this this this city of Kokura got got spared twice like it.

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 on Hiroshima? He had no idea. He didn't know it would be Hiroshima? He did not know it was Hiroshima. He didn't 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. He issues an order which says, stop dropping atomic bombs until I tell you to.

I feel like if you're a president and you're going to 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, 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. Right.

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, which 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, you know, 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 Khrushchev over those Cuban missiles. Soviet military units are in a 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, handcuffed to the assistant. And the 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 times. And so weirdly, the suitcase is called the football. And I believe the page with the nuclear launch codes on it is called the biscuit. Why? I have no idea why.

I have no idea where it got the name. So it's the 60s and things between the U.S. and the Soviet Union are very tense. And there are generals on the Joint Chiefs, Curtis LeMay among them, who are... They call bombs away LeMay. Yeah, who are very, who are not at all troubled by the possibility that this would be a weapon they would use. And they advocate it very specifically in very specific cases. 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. And one guy in particular. This guy, Roger Fisher, 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, you know,

the president could very dispassionately start a 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 Elliot 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 success

Solution to this. And by the way, this would be just in the case of a U.S. surprise attack. It's 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. Surgically. 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 would have to kill someone and pull the code out of their body. 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. It's 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 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, the butcher knife is the ultimate anti-button.

But how are you going to find a guy to put the codes inside his heart? I would volunteer. I would volunteer to be that guy. Really? You would? Totally. In 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 be best friends with the President. We would take walks. We would go swimming together. It would be great. We would be best friends. That would be my mission, would be to make it...

as hard as humanly possible for him to carve over my chest. Okay, we have some thank yous to make here. Why don't you go ahead? All right. First, thank you to Catherine Kilachowski of 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 Wellerstein has a nuclear history blog. He calls it Restricted Data. Check that out. Alex, in turn, wanted us to thank John Koster Mullen, Michael Gordon, Eric Schlosser, and Spencer Weir.

And special thanks to actors Michael Chernus and Noah Robbins. And also, let's not forget Damiano Marchetti for production support. And we thought we would just go out with our final salute to buttons by the one, one mechanism man created that hates a button. The music you are hearing was arranged by the composer Keith Harrison. It is a zipper rag. Zippers being mortal enemies.

On that note, you weirdos, we should go. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. Go ahead, Latif. And I'm Latif Nasr. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes: With help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab 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. Thank you.

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