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 (pictured) 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.
Polley owned 18 U.S. patents for the Flash-Matic and other inventions, according to David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times, who has also offered up a nice video tribute to the late Zenith engineer.
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.
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