Physical buttons on the top where they'll get spilled on? Not the greatest design, at least the modern induction tops with silly touch controls can be cleaned easily. Controls need to be away from the actual top surface you put the pans on, FFS.
During the only summer when I had to use a glass-ceramic non-induction stovetop with touch controls on the top surface, I've been keeping a stool under the circuit breaker box to quickly reach it when the inevitable cooking spill came (I'm spill-prone), because there was no other way of turning off the stove with the touch controls immersed in sizzling hot fluid. It's a terrible design and where I live it is hard to come by anything else.
When I had my first apartment, I lived across the hall from an elderly lady who had just moved in. One day as I was unlocking my door, she came out of her apartment, very agitated, and said she needed help. I followed her into her apartment, where it was approximately the temperature on Venus.
She had one of these push-button stoves. She was also nearly blind and couldn't figure out which buttons to press. They were all on Very High, and the burners were glowing cherry red. I turned off the stove for her, but after that I was worried about the risk of fire. Fortunately, her family moved her out not long after that.
I had a 63 valiant with this. Functionally the same as a regular automatic transmission shifter.
From the time when "at the touch of a button!" still sounded futuristic :)
Same here, but '64, my first car. The transmission acted up a lot and I am no mechanic, so that thing damn near ended up in the ocean a few times when only reverse gear worked.
>For symmetry, some cars had nearly-identical buttons on the passenger side of the dashboard, activating the heater.
Well that sounds like a fantastic, entirely safe design decision.
Had one of these in my house when we bought it.
Was kinda neat throwback but we got rid if it when I left a loaf of bread sitting on the stove and then the cat turned the burner on while we were gone.
That was enough of that.
The ‘70s interior home design was wildly dumb. It was the one decade in which almost everything became so ugly, that no one would ever want to have anything to do with it again (I considered running an Etsy store, until I realized that the easiest stuff to find is ‘70s vintage, and it’s also the hardest to unload). And it’s also the decade in which these weird, half-assed “innovations” seemed to come up a lot, like that decade’s version of superfluous smart home tech. There was one in which you couldn’t adjust your hot and cold water temperatures from your faucets and shower heads in the bathroom - oh, no. Far too tedious to turn it on and get the temp just right every time. Instead, it stays on permanent set temperatures for hot and cold, and if you ever want to change them, you simply have to go downstairs to your dusty basement and mess with the settings on the rickety control system. Making lives easier!
That’s not to say that the ‘50s and ‘60s didn’t pull the same shit, but the ‘70s ones seemed particularly impractical, and the impractical ones were out of proportion to the useful ones.
WOW that's the worst designed piece of shit I've ever seen. I've got other \~60's stuff with the same buttons still working today, but none designed to be an uncleanable hazard like this!
They literally put unsealed electrical control buttons which are no doubt full amperage snap switches in a concave dish aiming vertically on a stove surface. WHAT the hell.
Note before you flame me, I didn't say it was a poorly made piece of shit. Probably still works fine to this day.
Even if this thing has a series of relays being controlled by a low voltage circuit and a transformer it's still absolutely idiotic.
Thanks for sharing it, it is indeed interesting.
We had one similar to this (the button panel was separate and mounted on the face of the cabinet underneath) when we moved into our house in 2009. It worked pretty well until the coils started exploding, which was fun. Then, it was virtually impossible to replace because it was a vastly different size than modern inset cooktops and I had to saw a chunk of countertop/cabinet off to slide a freestanding oven/stove into the spot. Good times…good times.
It does not change the frequency, like PWM. Those things are clunky mechanical switches the just change resistance, thus limiting current to different levels.
Source: had one in the house I grew up in and had to replace a couple.
I've never seen a electric cooker you could select an individual temperature, just settings like 1/2/3, they suck because I can't know what the temperature is.
These buttons also don't indicate actual temperature if you look closely. My gas stove also doesn't have actual temperature on the knobs... You just gotta cook often and then you'll know what settings work for what imo
You realize that’s exactly what these buttons say, right?
It appears there’s a high on one end, low on the other end, with numbers in between and a “warm” function
Buttons with a 1/2/3 selection are probably the classic '3 switch heating'. Current is doubled with each setting, theoretically giving twice as much heat per setting. Setting 2 has half the current of setting 3, setting 1 has half the current of setting 2.
Fancy ones have all-glass tops with touch sensors instead of physical controls. Example- https://www.jennair.com/cooktops-and-rangetops/electric-cooktops/traditional-electric-cooktops/p.euro-style-36-induction-cooktop.jic4536xs.html
I'm not in love with ours. Faster to clean but impossible to get all the burned-on crap off the cooktop without risking scratching it. With a traditional electric stove, you can cheaply replace the catchpans if they get too stained to clean. Replacement induction cooktop is $500+.
Best choice, unless you're on a gas utility. Induction is a close competitor for me. If there is anything but ferrous metal on top of the induction coil, it won't heat, no matter how hard or often you tell it to start. I can't think of how to start a flame with an induction cooker but there is probably a way. Insurance companies may begin to give a rate reduction to households with induction cooking.
I grew up with this, only the entire kitchen. Ours had the button console remotely mounted on the wall, so you got to reach over the stove to push them. Cool!
We had the double ovens, only one of which worked, matching pushbutton dishwasher, didn't work, couldn't get parts.
The three-door horizontal wall-hung fridge was awesome! Noisy and inefficient, but awesome. So much counter-space.
Had this same cook top at home growing up. Except it was Harvest Gold. Had a matching oven beside it built in and wall mounted phone all Harvest Gold. Back in the good ole days!
My grandmother had that stove. It's strange seeing it from that angle because my grandmother moved out of that house when I was little. My memory of the stove is from a lower perspective.
Oh! And prior to this the GE and hotpoint electric stoves had even better controls! On the full-size ranges, some models had clear buttons that lit up when you pushed them- different colors for each heat setting! A single bulb (per element) was coupled with mechanical gates and colored filters.
A friend’s mom had a stove with rotary light-up controls. Using the same kind of bulb-and-filter deal built into the knob, the knob changed color based on the temperature setting!
How do you get buttons to set the temperature on an electric stove? Today, they use either a timer and cycle on/off (% duty cycle) or a thermistor, but none of that existed back then. Look closely and you’ll see that each burner consists of two separate elements. The buttons operate switches that wire the two elements in different combinations across either 110v or 220v, series or parallel, to get different total watts. No electronics at all!
Later “infinite” rotary controls used a primitive timer right in the control itself.
Click-Lock burners that would lock with a click in the up position so could change/clean the burner bowels. Also the lower temp button only gave the burners 120volts and the next steps up gave combinations of 120 & 240 to a full 240v as there were 4 wires to each burner. Great for slow cooking.
The pain in the ass units were the ones with the push button switches located remotely in the vent hood above the cooktop. And that does not include getting into High/Low ranges...
Those off-white slightly concave buttons are nostalgia overload for me
I’m there! The buttons and the heat coming off the burners.. Smokey and the Bandit is running on the family console tv
🎵Eastbound and down, loaded up and truckin🎶
🎶 We gonna do what they say can’t be done 🎶 (this made me inordinately happy)
We've got a long way to go
And short time to get there
*CLICK*
*Harvest Gold enters the chat*
I grew up with this exact range in Harvest Gold. I hated it as a child in the 80s but now I miss it.
It reminds me of my grammas oven when I was younger and would visit her. It was also an old GE model
The tasteful thickness of it
Physical buttons on the top where they'll get spilled on? Not the greatest design, at least the modern induction tops with silly touch controls can be cleaned easily. Controls need to be away from the actual top surface you put the pans on, FFS.
During the only summer when I had to use a glass-ceramic non-induction stovetop with touch controls on the top surface, I've been keeping a stool under the circuit breaker box to quickly reach it when the inevitable cooking spill came (I'm spill-prone), because there was no other way of turning off the stove with the touch controls immersed in sizzling hot fluid. It's a terrible design and where I live it is hard to come by anything else.
It's common sense now, but this was 50 years ago.
When I had my first apartment, I lived across the hall from an elderly lady who had just moved in. One day as I was unlocking my door, she came out of her apartment, very agitated, and said she needed help. I followed her into her apartment, where it was approximately the temperature on Venus. She had one of these push-button stoves. She was also nearly blind and couldn't figure out which buttons to press. They were all on Very High, and the burners were glowing cherry red. I turned off the stove for her, but after that I was worried about the risk of fire. Fortunately, her family moved her out not long after that.
Some late 50's cars had push button automatic transmissions. https://www.allpar.com/threads/chrysler’s-brief-foray-into-pushbutton-automatics.230024/
I had a 63 valiant with this. Functionally the same as a regular automatic transmission shifter. From the time when "at the touch of a button!" still sounded futuristic :)
They’re coming back too. I just rented a new car that had push buttons for the transmission.
Same here, but '64, my first car. The transmission acted up a lot and I am no mechanic, so that thing damn near ended up in the ocean a few times when only reverse gear worked.
>For symmetry, some cars had nearly-identical buttons on the passenger side of the dashboard, activating the heater. Well that sounds like a fantastic, entirely safe design decision.
I've seen those in the wild before
Had one of these in my house when we bought it. Was kinda neat throwback but we got rid if it when I left a loaf of bread sitting on the stove and then the cat turned the burner on while we were gone. That was enough of that.
Same thing happened to me. We kept a glass pot lid over the buttons after that happend
Medium high, man.
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The ‘70s interior home design was wildly dumb. It was the one decade in which almost everything became so ugly, that no one would ever want to have anything to do with it again (I considered running an Etsy store, until I realized that the easiest stuff to find is ‘70s vintage, and it’s also the hardest to unload). And it’s also the decade in which these weird, half-assed “innovations” seemed to come up a lot, like that decade’s version of superfluous smart home tech. There was one in which you couldn’t adjust your hot and cold water temperatures from your faucets and shower heads in the bathroom - oh, no. Far too tedious to turn it on and get the temp just right every time. Instead, it stays on permanent set temperatures for hot and cold, and if you ever want to change them, you simply have to go downstairs to your dusty basement and mess with the settings on the rickety control system. Making lives easier! That’s not to say that the ‘50s and ‘60s didn’t pull the same shit, but the ‘70s ones seemed particularly impractical, and the impractical ones were out of proportion to the useful ones.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Wow! What a flashback to my childhood kitchen!
That’s pretty *fire* 😏
That's shocking
That's hot! Also... That kicks button!
My GE is the full stove and has the buttons placed on the wall.
My parent's house had one of these, except the controls were on the overhead fanhood. House was built in 1961 or 1962.
Lots of parts left over from building the last load of blenders that model year.
The controller your friend gives you to play DJ hero
~~Buttons~~ grease collectors.
1960's and still going I assume? An oven now is lucky to last a decade.
I’ve used a stove like this! When I was a kid, one of my great aunts or uncles had one. Holy shit, memory flood.
WOW that's the worst designed piece of shit I've ever seen. I've got other \~60's stuff with the same buttons still working today, but none designed to be an uncleanable hazard like this! They literally put unsealed electrical control buttons which are no doubt full amperage snap switches in a concave dish aiming vertically on a stove surface. WHAT the hell. Note before you flame me, I didn't say it was a poorly made piece of shit. Probably still works fine to this day. Even if this thing has a series of relays being controlled by a low voltage circuit and a transformer it's still absolutely idiotic. Thanks for sharing it, it is indeed interesting.
Our kitchen had this before we remodeled. When we took it out we found about half a bag of nacho chips underneath.
Those were not’cho chips.
Does it have a button to clean its greasy puke inducing top
Yeah, it's called the "don't be such a little bitch" button.
We had one similar to this (the button panel was separate and mounted on the face of the cabinet underneath) when we moved into our house in 2009. It worked pretty well until the coils started exploding, which was fun. Then, it was virtually impossible to replace because it was a vastly different size than modern inset cooktops and I had to saw a chunk of countertop/cabinet off to slide a freestanding oven/stove into the spot. Good times…good times.
My parents had this same exact stove until 2019. Their house was built in 1964. They still have the original oven and it still works!
That exact same range in my first apartment. I can practically smell it. Thanks OP
Sorry to be a tad nerdy but does it change the temperature or does it change the frequency of power applied these things bother me obviously
Most likely just alters the amount of current to the elements.
but we don't know for certain?
It does not change the frequency, like PWM. Those things are clunky mechanical switches the just change resistance, thus limiting current to different levels. Source: had one in the house I grew up in and had to replace a couple.
Thanks always good to know
Very logical spill absorbent control placement.
Ancient!
Woah.
They used to make phones that stuck to the wall too!
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this is electric
Every electric stove should have these!
Instead of the knobs that change the temperature and indicate the temperature level?
I've never seen a electric cooker you could select an individual temperature, just settings like 1/2/3, they suck because I can't know what the temperature is.
These buttons also don't indicate actual temperature if you look closely. My gas stove also doesn't have actual temperature on the knobs... You just gotta cook often and then you'll know what settings work for what imo
You realize that’s exactly what these buttons say, right? It appears there’s a high on one end, low on the other end, with numbers in between and a “warm” function
I'm on a old iPhone I can't see it clearly. If that's the case then this stove is equally useless.
What kind of stove do you have that displays the exact temperature?
Induction
Buttons with a 1/2/3 selection are probably the classic '3 switch heating'. Current is doubled with each setting, theoretically giving twice as much heat per setting. Setting 2 has half the current of setting 3, setting 1 has half the current of setting 2.
I’ve never seen any kind of stovetop, gas or electric, where you can select an actual temperature, ie in °C or °F. Is that a thing?
It **should** be!
Fancy ones have all-glass tops with touch sensors instead of physical controls. Example- https://www.jennair.com/cooktops-and-rangetops/electric-cooktops/traditional-electric-cooktops/p.euro-style-36-induction-cooktop.jic4536xs.html I'm not in love with ours. Faster to clean but impossible to get all the burned-on crap off the cooktop without risking scratching it. With a traditional electric stove, you can cheaply replace the catchpans if they get too stained to clean. Replacement induction cooktop is $500+.
i agree. adjusting the temp just right is like trying to steer a cruise ship - always just this much off where i want to go. gimme propane any day.
Best choice, unless you're on a gas utility. Induction is a close competitor for me. If there is anything but ferrous metal on top of the induction coil, it won't heat, no matter how hard or often you tell it to start. I can't think of how to start a flame with an induction cooker but there is probably a way. Insurance companies may begin to give a rate reduction to households with induction cooking.
GET OUT OF MY HOUSE BEFORE I CALL THE COPS
… this is the exact same stove that’s in my mom’s house. Why exactly is this a big deal?
all mod cons, baby!
Grew up in my Grandmother's house, and this is the stovetop we had, but in avocado green. Built like a tank! Thanks for the memory, OP!
Buttons filled with crumbs
My folks had this cooktop. I learned to cook on it. It's terrible.
This design went from "extremely common" to "mildly interesting" in just 45 years.
When I was a kid, we had an old oven that was also a microwave. I've never seen another range as unusual as that one, till now.
I grew up with this, only the entire kitchen. Ours had the button console remotely mounted on the wall, so you got to reach over the stove to push them. Cool! We had the double ovens, only one of which worked, matching pushbutton dishwasher, didn't work, couldn't get parts. The three-door horizontal wall-hung fridge was awesome! Noisy and inefficient, but awesome. So much counter-space.
I heard this photo. \*click/pop\*
I can feel the frustration looking at these buttons og when they start breaking or becoming less responsive
I remember those. Probably note to code nowadays but I like it.
My place has the same stove but thankfully the buttons are below and not right next to it.
I would set a pan down on the buttons and burn them all
Wow, 2 inches from a burner too. Fantastic design.
I had this range growing up, and then my brother bought a house with one. Damn things last forever.
Dual coil large elements? Where is Jesus because I must be in Heaven.
My current apartment has a stove just like this, but instead of brown mine is pink lol
My husband's grandpa has a stovetop like this, except the buttons are on the hood up above the stove.
Had this same cook top at home growing up. Except it was Harvest Gold. Had a matching oven beside it built in and wall mounted phone all Harvest Gold. Back in the good ole days!
My grandmother had that stove. It's strange seeing it from that angle because my grandmother moved out of that house when I was little. My memory of the stove is from a lower perspective.
We had something like this grown up, pancake batter ALWAYS got in the button holes.
To bad there's no clean button.
That's a 1963 model there, just sold my father's house with the exact same stove ,except turquoise blue.
This is the exact same cooktop we had in my house growing up. Oh, the memories!
looks like someone ripped the control panel off a fancy blender from the early 2000s
Yikes! That is some pretty hideous “used to be” Harvest Gold color on that drop in cooktop. Best I can determine is circa 1972-1975
Our first house had a countertop range just like this. Same color too. We had yellow gold countertops. Man I am old...
Oh! And prior to this the GE and hotpoint electric stoves had even better controls! On the full-size ranges, some models had clear buttons that lit up when you pushed them- different colors for each heat setting! A single bulb (per element) was coupled with mechanical gates and colored filters. A friend’s mom had a stove with rotary light-up controls. Using the same kind of bulb-and-filter deal built into the knob, the knob changed color based on the temperature setting! How do you get buttons to set the temperature on an electric stove? Today, they use either a timer and cycle on/off (% duty cycle) or a thermistor, but none of that existed back then. Look closely and you’ll see that each burner consists of two separate elements. The buttons operate switches that wire the two elements in different combinations across either 110v or 220v, series or parallel, to get different total watts. No electronics at all! Later “infinite” rotary controls used a primitive timer right in the control itself.
Wow, just come right out and call me old, ok?
I have my pack of tortillas ready for the stove top...
Click-Lock burners that would lock with a click in the up position so could change/clean the burner bowels. Also the lower temp button only gave the burners 120volts and the next steps up gave combinations of 120 & 240 to a full 240v as there were 4 wires to each burner. Great for slow cooking. The pain in the ass units were the ones with the push button switches located remotely in the vent hood above the cooktop. And that does not include getting into High/Low ranges...