How the remote control changed humanity

A new phase of remote control is entering the scene. The increasing need for more and more functions has led designers to look for different ways to communicate with the TV set

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Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

It all started with something that 21st century television viewers can still identify with - rage at commercials.

In the XNUMXs in America, the president of Zenit Electronics, Eugene F. McDonald, posed a challenge to his company's engineers: He hated having to put up with advertisements.

He wanted a device that would allow him to mute them or switch to another channel (where, with any luck, something other than commercials was playing at the time).

And so the remote control as we know it today was born.

MacDonald's wish started a revolution, changing the way we watch television - less as passive observers and more as cruel controllers.

If we don't like what we're watching, a new channel is just a click away.

Zenit's device that changed everything was called Flešmatik, it was designed by engineer Eugene Poli and was first put on sale in 1955.

"He wasn't an electronics engineer, he was a mechanical engineer," John Taylor, Zenit's in-house historian and director of media at its parent company LG, told Poly.

"That's why the device was mostly mechanical."

There were devices that could change television channels before, but they were connected to the television itself - practically via an umbilical cord.

The most famous of these was Zenit's Lazy Bounce.

It allowed the user to turn the TV on or off and change channels - but not to mute naughty commercials.

The flash drive was completely separated from the TV screen.

It used "a light source directed at a sensor in each corner of the television screen," Taylor lies.

"It allowed the viewer to mute the sound, switch the channel left or right, all by lighting up a button on the screen."

In keeping with the fifties obsession with space and modern design, the Flashmatic looked like something Flash Gordon might use against some alien threat.

"It was the era of Sputnik and Buck Rogers," says Taylor.

"It looked like a small green laser gun."

There was, however, one major problem with Zenith's space-age falcon.

Those four sensors in the corners were sensitive to more than the light emitted by a television viewer's own hand.

"Depending on where your TV is in your living room, as the sun was coming up it could actually turn on the TV or change channels," says Taylor.

What looked like a child's toy actually had quite an adult price tag.

"Fleshmatic added $100 to the cost of a television set," says Taylor, "and that was at a time when you could buy a car for $600."

Zenit went back to the drawing board - this time to the drawing board of one of its electronics engineers, the physicist Robert Adler.

Adler's invention revolved around the luminous ray of the Fleshmatic. He had to come up with some completely new way of communicating between the remote control and the TV.

One idea was radio waves, but that was discarded very early on, Taylor says.

"If you live in an apartment building, you could start changing the channels on the TV in the next apartment just like in your own."

Adler's solution? Use sound. Zenit's new remote, called Space Command, was an ultrasonic remote that used hammers that hit aluminum plates in the remote.

They resonated at specific frequencies - causing the TV to turn on or off, change channels, or mute or unmute the sound.

Culture journalist Steven Beschloss says remote controls like Space Command were sleek and simple.

"The key to their appeal, I think, is their clarity of purpose. They had only a few functions and the user could enjoy a simple, easy operation.

"It was a far cry from many of our complicated remote controls today."

The space command looked like a Star Trek prop, with only four prominent buttons - sky and earth compared to today's devices that cram a few dozen buttons onto thin rectangular plastic.

The buttons hit the tiles with a whisper-quiet sound (it earned the nickname Clicker), but they heralded the era of ultrasonic remote controls - a method that was used until much of the XNUMXs.

The frequencies used in remote controls such as Space Command were too high to be registered by the human ear, but were detectable by animals such as dogs and cats.

I remember my older brother and sister chasing the cats around the house at their grandparents' house with one such device.

Taylor says there's an apocryphal anecdote at Zenith that during testing, a female lab assistant would wince every time the device was activated because of her sensitive sense of hearing.

Remote controls didn't have more than a few buttons until the mid-seventies. Moreover, it was the BBC that created the need for a more complicated device.

In 1974, he launched Sifax in Great Britain - a text service that used free space on analogue TV frequencies.

It was, however, impossible for most television viewers to call up news, sports and financial information pages with the help of an ordinary remote control.

A new one had to be made, which would have space for a numeric keypad (so that different page numbers could be called up) and be able to switch from the text service to normal TV.

The remote control as we know it today slowly began to take shape.

A new phase of remote control is entering the scene. The increasing need for more and more functions has led designers to look for different ways to communicate with the TV set.

They went a step further with infrared light.

Suddenly the remote control you're using has become quieter than a whisper (and the nickname Clicker has become so redundant).

But during the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, with the rise of cable television and the explosion of ancillary devices such as VCRs, DVD players, and game consoles, the remote control became… rather cluttered.

In a 2015 article for Slate, the author analyzed the sudden increase in the number of buttons on a device that was supposed to save us time.

"There are too many buttons... on my bedside table there are 92, to be exact, arranged in rubber rows, in seven different colors, with overlapping inscriptions that vary in tone from clear and aggressive ("POWER", "FREEZE") to meek and mysterious ("SUR", "NAVI")", he wrote.

"I counted the buttons I actually used - not the ones I pressed the most, but all the buttons I used at all." And that number was 34. I had a surplus of almost fifty buttons."

"The advent of cable TV in the XNUMXs, with dozens and dozens and even hundreds of channels, heralded a new era in which programmable remote controls had to perform various functions on a wide range of televisions," says Beschlos.

"Remote controls, like the cable TV system itself - have become more difficult to operate," he says.

But things have changed recently.

We may be returning to the golden age of the remote control - partly due to the fact that we don't watch as much television on our TVs anymore, and the remote controls we use don't necessarily have to be handheld.

"Not only are we moving toward being able to use our phones to control our home appliances, but we're starting to have wireless devices that receive verbal commands," Beschlos says.

"Instead of looking for my remote under the sofa or in its crevices, I just need to tell the remote which show or channel I want to watch on my TV screen.

"As someone who currently has about seven remote controls scattered around the apartment, that seems like progress to me."

The only downside to this new version?

It's much harder to make your Flash Gordon space fantasies come true.


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