fish-culture.5
Though impressive, the Centennial Exhibition’s technological exhibits led to
fears about jobs and about the horrible human effects of unemployment. The
Philadelphia Inquirer in 1876 wrote:
Want of employment leads to discouragement, hopelessness and despair. It
overflows 
almshouses, 
charitable 
institutions, 
prison 
houses 
and
penitentiaries. It degrades manhood. It ruins families. Misery, crime and
suicide follow in its wake. It supplies ready victims for the gallows.… To-day
one man does what would have been the work of a hundred, fifty years ago.
The steam-power of seven tons of coal is sufficient to make 33,000 miles of
cotton thread in ten hours, while, without machinery, this would equal the
hand labor of 70,000 women! Consumption does not keep pace with the
production by machinery. Markets become glutted.6
As a result of these fears, in 1879 Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts
set up a committee to “enquire and report as to the extent to which labor-saving
processes have entered into production and distribution of products to the
displacement of manual labor.”7
However, by 1879, a counternarrative had already developed: labor-saving
processes will increase the number of jobs, not decrease them. One editorial in
the Daily American, dismissing the worries about replacement of labor by
machines, noted,
The whole tendency of labor-saving processes is towards the elevation of the
laboring classes, and if the change is accompanied by some hardship, so is
every step in the progress of the human race.8
This editorial sounds very much like arguments made today to reassure workers
regarding their fear of job loss, but the overall discussion of labor-saving
machinery during the depression of the 1870s suggests that such arguments were
not persuasive.
Henry George’s 1879 best seller, Progress and Poverty, faced these issues
head on. The book held that the immense technological advances of the time
were creating inequality and increasing the number of people who lived in
poverty. The book asserted:

For, if labor-saving inventions went on until perfection was attained, and the
necessity of labor in the production of wealth was entirely done away with,
then everything that the earth could yield could be obtained without labor,
and the margin of cultivation would be extended to zero. Wages would be
nothing, and interest would be nothing, while rent would take everything. For
the owners of land, being enabled without labor to obtain all the wealth that
could be procured from nature, there would be no use for either labor or
capital, and no possible way in which either could compel any share of wealth
produced. And no matter how small population might be, if any body [sic] but
the land owners continued to exist, it would be at the whim or by the mercy of
the land owners—they would be maintained either for the amusement of land
owners, or, as paupers, by their bounty.9
At this time, the phrase push a button arose to indicate a mechanical actuation
that completes an electrical circuit. For example, in 1879, the news described an
invention in France that would allow a horse’s rider to push a button to deliver
an electrical shock to the horse, a system that could be used to discipline a
misbehaving horse.10

Labor-Saving Inventions and the Depression of the 1890s
Such inventions only exacerbated fears of unemployment. An 1894 editorial in
the Los Angeles Times blamed the severity of the 1890s depression on labor-
saving inventions:
There is no doubt that the introduction of labor-saving machinery and the
consequent increase of production has had more than a little to do with the
present depression in business.… It is true that during the past few years the
increase in the invention and adoption of labor-saving machinery has been so
great that the community has scarcely been able to keep up with it.11
The article then went on to list recent examples of labor-saving innovations:
In the manufacture of hats machinery has multiplied the productive power of
labor nearly nine times. Manifestly we can’t wear nine times as many hats as
formerly.
By the adoption of improved processes the labor involved in the
production of flour has been reduced 80 percent, yet we can each eat no more
flour.12
That same year, the San Francisco Chronicle chimed in with an editorial
about labor-saving machinery. The editorial was entitled “The Great Problem”:
The rich have grown richer and the poor have grown poorer. Side by side with
the growth of enormous fortunes the hovels of the struggling laborers have
become more dilapidated.… And to further emphasize the seriousness of
these considerations it may be said that this problem must soon be solved or
there will come a cataclysm which will destroy modern civilization.13
In 1895 a new dumbwaiter system was installed in US kitchens in multifloor
buildings. The dumbwaiter had an array of buttons, one for each floor of the
building. Press the number of the floor, and the elevator would automatically
ascend to that floor and stop there, to return if a button was then pressed from
that floor.
In “Stores Are Merely Labor-Saving Machines,” an 1897 letter to the editor
of the Chicago Daily Tribune, the letter writer adds to the growing list of labor-
saving innovations. He refers to the department store movement, the movement