Post Flash-Matic Stress Disorder
Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 9:31 pm
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404761,00.asp wrote: Remote Control Inventor Eugene Polley Dies at 96
By Damon Poeter, May 22, 2012 04:06pm EST
<<Eugene Polley, inventor of the wireless television remote control, has died at the age of 96, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. Polley died of natural causes on Sunday in a Chicago-area hospital.
The former Zenith engineer's green, gun-shaped Flash-Matic remote control was introduced in 1955, five years after the Zenith Radio Corporation unveiled Lazy Bones, a TV remote that was connected to the set with a wire. By aiming Polley's ray gun-like Flash-Matic very precisely at the receiver, one could pull the red trigger to shoot a beam of light at a photoelectric cell to change the channel and adjust the volume. Unfortunately, the Flash-Matic system proved somewhat flawed, because direct sunlight shining on the receiver's photo cells could also trigger the remote control functions.
But Polley's breakthrough led to a better device developed just a year later by Robert Adler, a fellow engineer at Zenith, which is now owned by LG Electronics. Adler's Zenith Space Command used ultrasound instead of light to trigger functions on the TV receiver. That remote made a signature "clicking" sound when it struck a bar to emit various frequencies that could be detected by the television set. Remote controls thus became known as "clickers," a nickname still used by some, even though succeeding generations of electronic ultrasonic remotes lost the signature clicking sound. Eventually, those devices were replaced by remotes using infrared systems that enabled more complex functionality, bringing remote control technology back full circle to Polley's original, light-based Flash-Matic.
Polley's invention touched off a revolution in television viewing. The remote control is now so ubiquitous that generations of television viewers are largely unaware that there was a time when one had to get up from the couch and twiddle with knobs on the set itself to change the channel. One somewhat comic side-effect of people's reliance on remotes occurs when they misplace one—it's common for a TV viewer today to spend far more time looking for the missing remote under the sofa cushions than it would have taken to simply change the channel on the set as one did back in the pre-Flash-Matic days.
The inventor, who was honored with the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers' (IEEE) Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award in 2009, contributed to the war effort during World War II by helping the U.S. Department of Defense develop radar. Polley and Adler were co-recipients of an Emmy in 1997 for their contributions to television. In his later career, Polley helped to develop the push-button car radio and the video disk.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adler wrote: Robert Adler (December 4, 1913 – February 15, 2007) was an Austrian-born American inventor who held numerous patents. Adler was born in Vienna in 1913. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Vienna in 1937.Following Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany in 1939, Dr. Adler, a Jew, left the country. He traveled first to Belgium, then to England. After emigrating to the United States, he began working at Zenith Electronics in the research division in 1941.
In his lifetime, Adler was granted 58 US patents. The invention Adler is best known for is the wireless remote control for televisions. While not the first remote control, its underlying technology was a vast improvement over previous remote control systems.
A system based on radio waves was briefly considered but rejected because the signals could easily travel through walls and could inadvertently change the channel on a neighbor's television. Furthermore, the marketing people at Zenith desired a remote control which did not require batteries, as it was perceived at the time that if the battery died, the customer might think something was wrong with the television set itself.
Adler's solution was to use sound waves to transmit signals to the TV. The first remote control he developed, the "Space Command", used aluminum rods, analogous to tuning forks, struck by hammers toggled by the buttons on the device, to produce high-frequency tones that would be interpreted to control functions on the television set.
In the 1960s, Adler modified the remote control to use ultrasonic signals, a technology which went on to be used in television sets manufactured for the next 25 years, until replaced by infrared systems which could transmit more complex commands (but, alas, require batteries to run).>>
