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When, where and who invented the push button or switch like the ones on a keyboard or the switch to turn on the light – or even a button as some toilets have to flush. These days such buttons are everywhere, but I imagine it must be a fairly recent invention. Perhaps if you go back a few centuries there were no such buttons at all?
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Why are such buttons called the same as the buttons you use on clothes? They have little in common. And other European languages also use the same (though different from the English) name for the two. E.g. in Danish they’re both called “knap”.
Push buttons certainly predate electrical/electronic devices, but the word ‘button’ also predates both push-buttons and clothes buttons - deriving from the same root as bud - a small rounded protuberance.
Similarly (I think) the Danish word is related to knob - a term that I suspect will be found to predate both push-knobs and clothes knobs.
So they are called the same thing because they are (or were) both little round protruberances that needed naming.
I don’t think there’s a Danish work corresponding to “knob”, of course the could have then, I can’t say. I think the Danish “knap” comes from the Germanic form, while your “button” comes from Latin through French. I’ve read that you can still find people in the old Danelaw that’ll use some form of the word “knap” instead of “button”.
Wikipedia says clothing buttons were invented by the Romans (I thought those were much older inventions). Perhaps humans have always used push buttons in one form or other. When anyone sees a push button today, it speaks “push me!”, and it’s nearly instinctive that if you push a button something is supposed to happen, but I’m thinking if you took a Roman and showed him such a button, it wouldn’t tell him anything.