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A push-button (also spelled pushbutton) or simply button is a simple switch mechanism to control some aspect of a machine or a process. Buttons are typically made out of hard material, usually plastic or metal. [1] The surface is usually flat or shaped to accommodate the human finger or hand, so as to be easily depressed or pushed.
A push-button telephone is a telephone that has buttons or keys for dialing a telephone number, in contrast to a rotary dial used in earlier telephones.. Western Electric experimented as early as 1941 with methods of using mechanically activated reeds to produce two tones for each of the ten digits and by the late 1940s such technology was field-tested in a No. 5 Crossbar switching system in ...
A push switch (button) is a momentary or non-latching switch which causes a temporary change in the state of an electrical circuit only while the switch is physically actuated. An automatic mechanism (i.e. a spring ) returns the switch to its default position immediately afterwards, restoring the initial circuit condition.
In the U.S., the buttons were commonly black; the "on" button typically had a white mother-of-pearl (real or simulated) inlay to indicate its function. By convention, the switch was customarily installed with the "on" button on top. Push-button switch reproductions are available on the market today for vintage or authentic styling.
A biased switch contains a mechanism that springs it into another position when released by an operator. The momentary push-button switch is a type of biased switch. The most common type is a "push-to-make" (or normally-open or NO) switch, which makes contact when the button is pressed and breaks when the button is released.
A telephone keypad is a keypad installed on a push-button telephone or similar telecommunication device for dialing a telephone number. It was standardized when the dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) system was developed in the Bell System in the United States in the 1960s – this replaced rotary dialing , that had been developed for ...
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From the 1960s onward, the rotary dial was gradually supplanted by push-button telephones, first introduced to the public at the 1962 World's Fair under the trade name Touch-Tone (DTMF). Touch-tone technology primarily used a keypad in the form of a rectangular array of push-buttons. Although no longer in common use, the rotary dial's legacy ...