Push-button
simple mechanism with an area that can be temporarily pushed down to control a device
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. The surface is usually flat or shaped to accommodate the human finger or hand, so as to be easily depressed or pushed. Buttons are most often biased switches, although many un-biased buttons (due to their physical nature) still require a spring to return to their un-pushed state.
Terms for the "pushing" of a button include pressing, depressing, mashing, slapping, hitting, and punching.
Uses
The "push-button" has been utilized in calculators, push-button telephones, kitchen appliances, and various other mechanical and electronic devices, home and commercial.
In industrial and commercial applications, push buttons can be connected together by a mechanical linkage so that the act of pushing one button causes the other button to be released. In this way, a stop button can "force" a start button to be released. This method of linkage is used in simple manual operations in which the machine or process has no electrical circuits for control.
Red pushbuttons can also have large heads (called mushroom heads) for easy operation and to facilitate the stopping of a machine.
The public source identifies “Push-button” as simple mechanism with an area that can be temporarily pushed down to control a device. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Push-button, simple and mechanism.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q870870. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Push-button” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.