The surprising origins of the TV remote


It began with something TV viewers of the 21st Century can still identify with – anger over the adverts.To get more news about [url=https://remotescn.com/product-category/remote-controls-products/remote-cont... remote[/url], you can visit remotescn.com official website.

In the 1950s in the US, Zenith Electronics president Eugene F McDonald gave the company’s engineers a challenge: he hated having to sit through adverts. He wanted a device that could let him mute them, or skip to another channel (…where hopefully something other than adverts were playing).
McDonald’s wish spawned a revolution, changing the way we watched television – less as a passive observer, more a ruthless overseer. If we didn’t like what we saw, a new channel was the flick of a switch away.Zenith’s game-changing device was called the Flashmatic, designed by an engineer called Eugene Polley and released in 1955.

“He was not an electrical engineer, but a mechanical engineer,” says John Taylor, the in-house historian for Zenith and a press director at its parent company LG, of Polley. “So the device was largely mechanical.”

There had been devices that could change TV channels before, but these had been attached to the television itself – the remote connected by an umbilical cord. The most famous of these was Zenith’s own Lazy-Bones. It allowed the user to turn the TV on or off and change channels – but not mute those pesky commercials.
The Flashmatic was completely free of the TV set. It used “a directional light source with a sensor in each corner of the TV screen”, says Taylor. “This allowed the viewer to mute the sound, turn the channel over to the left or the right, all by flashing the button at the screen.”

In keeping with the 1950s preoccupation with space and modern design, the Flashmatic looked like something Flash Gordon might use against some otherworldly threat. “This was the era of Sputnik and Buck Rogers,” says Taylor. “It looks like a little green ray gun.”

There was one big problem with Zenith’s space-age contraption, however. Those four sensors in the corner were sensitive to more than just the light being zapped from the TV watcher’s hand. “Depending on where your TV was located in your lounge, as the Sun came up it might actually turn on the TV or change the channels,” says Taylor.What might have looked like a child’s toy also came with a very adult price tag. “The Flashmatic added $100 on to the price of a television set,” Taylor says, “and that’s at a time when you could buy a car for $600.”

Zenith went back to the drawing board – this time the drawing board of one of its electrical engineers, a physicist named Robert Adler.

Adler’s invention got rid of the zapping light rays of the Flashmatic. He would have to come up with a new way for the remote to talk to the TV.