Before the TV remote, channel surfing was practically impossible. How did we end up perfecting the TV watching experience? Let's find out.
Transcript:
There are some things that we simply cannot go through our day to day life without, and with the ever-increasing popularity of the TV, remote controls have become a necessity. Boundless content at the palm of your hands, as long as you didn’t lose it in the couch that is. In fact, TVs are hardly even usable without their dedicated remote anymore. Have you tried controlling a TV using only the buttons on the side? It’s an incredibly unique form of torture.
Where did this handy little device come from though, who invented it, and how much does our modern day TV remote resemble the original? Let’s find out.
Before the it’s usage with televisions, the remote had other intended uses. Renowned inverter Nikola Tesla created one of the first wireless remote controls in 1898. The Teleautomaton was designed to control any number of mechanical devices, which he demonstrated by controlling a miniature boat in front of a crowd. The remote would send radio waves to an antenna on the little boat, generating signals to shift electrical currents, in turn adjusting the rudder and propeller.
The remote control, surprisingly, was a flop. The intended client, The U.S Navy, thought that the invention was too unreliable for war, but the invention still picked up traction in other fields. Eventually, the remote would fulfill its original goal of steering boats during wartime, a method used by the Germans in WW1 to send explosives at enemy ships. This same wireless transmission technology would be integrated into creating guided missiles and torpedoes shortly after.
However, the remote would eventually break away from it’s military roots and found it’s technology being used in consumers homes. Devices like garage door openers, model airplanes, and radios were experimenting with wireless signals in the form of remote controls.
Televisions at the time had a pretty unintuitive design for changing the channel and volume. A mess of rotating dials and buttons were used on the device, and the poor viewer had to get up and walk to the TV in order to flip channels.
In 1950, Zenith would introduce the Lazy Bones remote, which essentially was the first real television remote, capable of changing channels, controlling power, and so on. However, the remote was NOT wireless at all, and in fact was bound to the TV with an incredibly bulky cord. After one two many kids, dogs, and parents tripped over the thing and sent the remote flinging back toward the TV, the public decided it was a flop.
A few years later, Zenith engineer Eugene Polley would create the Flashmatic, a wireless remote this time, which used directional flashes of light from the space-age looking flashlight to control the television. However, the TV’s photocells in each corner of the screen would end up responding to ANY sort of light. Causing a device that would turn off and on, change channels, and crank up the volume at random.
Despite this, the Flashmatic was the groundwork that the future Zenith remote controls would be built upon, instead using ultrasonic sounds to control vacuum tubes within TVs for their control. Despite prices of TVs going up 30% to account for the extra technology, the public kept on buying them. It seems that once they had a remote that worked well, they were willing to pay any price to save themselves from having to get up again.
These small, handheld battery powered remotes were the standard for almost 30 years, being replicated by nearly every TV manufacturer and being sold over 9 million times until eventually being replaced by the now standard infrared signals in the 1980s, a technology that persists in the remotes we use to this very day.
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