Over at History of the Button Bill DeRouchey likes to mull over the history of industrial design as it relates to that ubiquitous cultural artifact: the button. In a post from a few weeks ago, he ran a neat little entry about an ad for a General Electric oven with the title 1950: Pushbutton cooking. I read that entry and realized that my grandmother had the oven in question. In fact, she still has it in her house and it still works fine after more than fifty years. I vowed that the next time I visited her I would get some nice photos of the oven, since the pictures in the ad weren't very clear.

Here's what the oven looks like up close (all of these images can be clicked for a larger version):

Note how they managed to make everything come out symmetrically: three knobs in the middle, two groups of six buttons on each side (each group controls one burner) and a "light" button on the far left that balances the oven controls on the far right. The burners were all on one side, giving you a nice, heatproof place to set pans on the right. The back, left burner lifts out and you can drop a special pot into the hole for deep-fat frying. For an electric oven, it's pretty nice.

The buttons that control the burners are very well done, but there is one oddity. They range thus: HI  2  3  LO  WM  OFF. The oddity, to me at least, is the ordering of the numbers. Shouldn't 3 come before 2? Aren't larger numbers hotter? Luckily, it doesn't matter, the spacial layout makes it obvious when the labels fail.

The best thing about the buttons was the fact that they were clear and lighted up when pressed (except for the OFF button, it was dark). Each button, from WM to HI was lit by a progressively hotter color, from blue for WM through yellow and orange to deep red for HI. This meant that you could tell the state of the oven from across the room, something you can't do with many modern ovens. Amazingly, the lights behind all but a couple of the buttons still work after nearly sixty years. Somewhere, GE has some serious light bulb technology that they have kept out of the mainstream.

In the center, the oven has two timers. There is a clock, that can turn the oven on and off at certain times (my grandmother says she has never used it a single time, however). There is also a wind-up timer that gives you up to an hour of cooking time. To the right is the oven temperature control.

On the far right, there are buttons to control the operation of the oven: BR  7B  BK  OFF. Broil and bake seem pretty obvious, but I'm damned if I know what 7B means (and I didn't think to ask my grandmother when I was there). I've thought and thought and I just can't come up with a meaning for 7B. Seven Burners? Seven Bake? Seven Broil? I just don't know.

A cool feature of the timers was that they also could be used to control an outlet on the top of the stove. This could be used to time cooking in an electric skillet or crock pot. These days, of course, everything has its own built-in timer. In 1950 this wasn't the case, however, and a generic timer was quite handy.

My grandmother only had one criticism. The buttons are quite close together and it's impossible to clean between them. Over the decades, a certain amount of gunk is going to build up in between all of those buttons, no matter how careful you are. I'd say the size of the oven is also a drawback. It's too big to fit the area allotted to ovens in most houses before the recent craze for giant kitchens.

To my amateur eyes, the whole oven seems to have very nice industrial design. The controls are obvious, easy to use and provide clear feedback. It's chock full of features without going overboard. It must have been very well made to have stood up in daily service for over fifty years.

Push-button everything may not have been the true look of the future (few modern electric ovens would be so focused on the push button as user interface), but GE did a pretty good job of making an appliance that was easy to use. My hat's off to whomever was in charge of designing this oven. They got it almost exactly right.

Update: As folks pointed out in the coments, what looks like 7B in the photo is really TB, which stands for "Timed Bake" –no mystery at all.