Household Items

Push-button plumbing
(Tappan Ultraflo, 1963)
Pushbutton plumbing
Tappan's system used an array of solenoids near the home's water heater to control the water temperature, eliminating the faucets, halving the number of pipes, and leaving no standing water in the pipes when off. (See a Popular Mechanics article on the system.)

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There are 2 comments for this item.

Posted by GlenEllyn at 12:07 am (PDT) on Tue September 4, 2012   
Around the mid-60s we moved into a house that had one of the GE push-button electric stovetops - it was turquoise. You're right, Max - some of the buttons didn't work very well. We'd push one in to get started, come back a few minutes later only to realize the burner never turned on. The stovetop was soon replaced with a brown gas one. But we kept the companion built-in electric oven - also turquoise - for many years. No push-buttons on it, though.
Posted by Max at 4:24 am (PDT) on Mon October 12, 2009   
Unlike doctors and nurses, I usually turn the water off before I dry my hands. I wouldn't particularly like using electric switches to control water flow, even if the circuits were super well grounded and low voltage.

I think this system failed because they could never make it reliable enough. This was the era of pushbutton control. Chrysler had the pushbutton automatic transmission, General Electric had a stove with a huge array of buttons to control four burners. It was the modern thing to do: control anything at all with "just the touch of a button."

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