September 3, 2025 • 42 mins
The initial time period where a TV remote control was developed was pretty short. And it shows how two different people perceive their work, and how that work is perceived differently over time by their employer.
Research:
- Adler, R. “Control System.” Dec. 17, 1957. U.S. Patent Office. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9a/fb/1a/619d2580b08526/US2817025.pdf
- AFX News. “COMPANY NEWS; MOTOROLA TO BUY ZENITH ELECTRONICS NETWORK SYSTEMS.” New York Times. July 20, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/20/business/company-news-motorola-to-buy-zenith-electronics-network-systems.html
- Benson-Allott, Caetlin. “Remote Control.” Bloomsbury Academic. 2015.
- Dowling, Stephen. “The Surprising Origins of the TV Remote.” BBC. Aug. 31, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180830-the-history-of-the-television-remote-contro
- Fox, Margalit. “Eugene Polley, Conjuror of a Device That Changed TV Habits, Dies at 96.” New York Times. May 22, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/business/eugene-t-polley-inventor-of-the-wireless-tv-remote-dies-at-96.html
- Gertner, Jon. “A Clicker Is Born.” New York Times Magazine. Dec. 30, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/magazine/30Adler-t.html
- Gregory, Ted. “Remote’s Inventor Hopes to Push Buttons of History.” Press of Atlantic City. Feb. 5, 2006. https://www.newspapers.com/image/926298372/?match=1&terms=eugene%20polley
- “Heritage.” Zenith. https://zenith.com/heritage/
- “Man who glued TV watchers to the couch dies.” Cnn.com (via AP). Feb 16, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070219040307/http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/02/16/obit.remote.control.ap/index.html
- “Now … a Flash of Light Without wires!” (Advertisement.) The Salt Lake Tribune. Nov. 20, 1955. https://www.newspapers.com/image/598655702/?match=1&terms=Flash-matic
- Polley, Eugene J. “Control System.” U.S. Patent Office. Sept. 8, 1959. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f7/02/b1/5716b40ac9c0fc/US2903575.pdf
- “Robert Adler.” National Inventors Hall of Fame. https://www.invent.org/inductees/robert-adler
- “Robert Adler - TV Wireless Remote.” Lemelson-MIT. https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/robert-adler
- Schofield, Jack. “Eugene Polley Obituary.” The Guardian. May 23, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/23/eugene-polley
- Slodysko, Brian. “Eugene Polley dies at 96; inventor of wireless TV remote control.” May 23, 2012. https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-eugene-polley-20120523-story.html
- Stroh, Michael. “The Couch Potato’s Best Friend.” Baltimore Sun. Nov. 22, 2006. https://www.newspapers.com/image/173151815/?match=1&terms=eugene%20polley
- “TV remote control inventor Eugene Polley dies at 96.” BBC. May 22, 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-18164200
- “You have to see it to believe it!” (Advertisement.) Syracuse herald-Journal. Sept. 27, 1955. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1088093208/?match=1&terms=Flash-matic
- “Zenith Space Command …” Evening World Herald/ Dec. 26, 1956. https://www.newspapers.com/image/883665550/?match=1&terms=%22Space%20Command%22
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio. Hello Owen, Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. This is another
one of those episodes that was intended to be an assortment,
(00:23):
a collection of things, and then it became about just
one of those things. Yeah. I was planning to write
about three or maybe four very mundane things that we
use every day in our lives and their origins. But
then when I got to the story of the TV
remote control, I discovered there was a drama. Uh. In
(00:45):
some ways, it's a one sided drama, but we'll talk
about it. This is one that's really relatable, I think
probably for anyone that has worked for a big company
and has felt like their contributions are lauded one moment
and forgotten the next. I think a lot of us
can relate to that. But it is also a story
about how two very different people perceive their work in
(01:06):
the same space, and how, in some cases that work
is perceived differently over time by those around them and
even their employer. The initial time period where a TV
remote control was being developed was actually pretty short. We
recently talked about spray paint and how that had multiple
(01:26):
options of people that get credited as the person that
are over literal decades. But this is like within eighteen months,
two people emerged, each of whom sometimes are called the
father of the remote control and one of those versions
that they created quickly supplanted the other. So we're going
to talk about those very early years and the way
(01:47):
that two inventors who were pivotal to the story have
been talked about in different ways by the company that
they both worked for. So we're starting a little earlier
than that, which is that in eighteen ninety eight, Nikola
Tesla received a patent for a remote control device. His
patent called this method of and apparatus for controlling mechanism
(02:10):
of moving vessels or vehicles. This invention was for quote,
controlling from a distance the operation of the propelling engines,
the steering apparatus and other mechanism carried by moving bodies
or floating vessels, of which the following is a specification
reference being had to the drawings accompanying and forming part
(02:30):
of the same That remote is not specifically germane to
the technology that we're talking about today, but it's illustrative
of the ways that people were thinking about using remote
controls well before televisions were even invented. We talked about
TV's invention in our twenty thirteen episode on Filot Farnsworth,
(02:54):
So jumping ahead from that moment more than one hundred years.
A two thousand and six write up about Eugene Polly
in the Atlantic City newspaper The Press reads, quote, fifty
years ago, Polly invented the wireless remote. In return, he
got one thousand dollars and a lifetime of gnawing irritation
at being squeezed out of pop culture history. Now he's
(03:18):
trying to set the record straight. And in that article,
Polly told the paper quote, not only did I not
get credit for doing anything, I got a kick in
the rear. So I stumbled upon this and said, what
is the backstory here? Suggest that there was drama? M
Eugene Theodore Polly was born on November twenty ninth, nineteen fifteen,
(03:41):
in Chicago. His mother, Vera Wachowski, was from a wealthy family,
but his father was a bootlegger. When Eugene was born,
Vera's family had cut off most contact with her because
of her connection to Eugene's father, but his father did
not stay around either. The two of them were separated
when Eugene was still really young. This is often described
(04:05):
as his father abandoning Vera and Eugene. His father's first
name is really never mentioned in any accounts of Eugene's life,
and later Eugene started using his confirmation name of Joseph
as his middle name. Yeah. I don't know if Theodore
was perhaps tied to his father in any way. That's
(04:26):
sheer speculation on my part, but there is definitely an
unwillingness to include any of that kind of discussion in
any stories of his life. Finances were very, very tight,
but Vera and Eugene got by together. And Eugene was
very clearly a super smart kid. He just had a
mind for all things mechanical. And after high school he
(04:48):
attended City Colleges of Chicago and then he went on
to the Armor Institute to study engineering. The Armor Institute
is the Illinois Institute of Technology today. But Polly wasn't
able to finish his studies and he didn't get his
engineering degree. The depression was making life harder and harder,
and his mother just needed help keeping their life together financially,
(05:11):
so Eugene joined the workforce. In nineteen thirty five, twenty
year old Eugene got hired by Zenith Radio Corporation and
he started there as a parts clerk. He didn't stay
in the stock room, though, he was eventually able to
move into the company's engineering department, and then he kept
moving up from there. He became a product engineer and
(05:33):
eventually moved into management and the mechanical engineering group. Zena's founder,
another Eugene. That's Eugene McDonald, started pushing his engineers to
come up with something that would enable viewers to not
have to endure commercials. This was in nineteen fifty. Apparently McDonald,
who had the nickname the Commander by his employees, uh,
(05:55):
just hated commercials and he figured most other viewers did too.
That's usually how this is reported, and it sounds like
kind of a feel good story about a captain of
industry fighting for the interests of his consumers. But it's
a little more complicated than that. McDonald thought that ad
supported television was not going to last, and moreover, he
(06:17):
did not want it to last, and that was in
part because Zenith was developing an early pay per view
business model, which would have competed with ad supported programming
where viewers did not have to pay directly to watch things.
Of course, his take on the potential of commercial driven
television proved wildly incorrect. There were radio remote controls of
(06:41):
various types going back to the nineteen twenties before the
rise of television, and they had evolved and improved significantly
over just a couple of decades, so it seemed like
there had to be a way to control a TV
with the remote too. There had already been an attempt
to control a TV remotely, but it was not really
all that helpful. That product was the Telezoom, which came
(07:04):
out in nineteen forty eight, and as that name suggests,
it let viewers zoom in on the picture. That was
the only thing that it did. I often zoom in
on pictures on my phone. I can see times you
might want to do that on TV. Not that many times.
(07:24):
It did not really take off. Yeah, it's tricky. I
have seen some explanations that suggest that the idea for
it was that TV's were so small at the time
that people would want to zoom in. But I'm like, yeah,
but it's a moving picture, so like what you zoom
in on, yeah, may not be germane to the story.
It's a it's a moving picture. And the image quality
(07:46):
was also limited enough that it seems like zooming in
would quickly just be like blobs. Yeah, I could see why.
It was not a rousing success. But the first invention
that came out of the Zenith Engineering group to solve
this problem of being able to silence commercials with something
called a lazy Bones, which I love. This was a
(08:08):
very simple remote. It was intended really just to silence
the TV during commercials, and Zenith advertised it that way,
hoping that it would help to hamper the use of
commercials and kind of kneecap commercial television. After all, if
consumers didn't hear the ad messaging, what was the point.
The Lazybones advertising encouraged viewers quote television fans have fun.
(08:32):
Sit back in your chair, relax, keep Zeni's new Lazybone
remote control handy to change stations, Press lightly with your
thumb and presto, there's the program you want. But the
Lazy Bones was not a wireless device. It had a
cable that users had to connect to their television and
it could turn the set on or off, or change
(08:53):
the channels, and it also was really good at tripping people.
Eugene McDonald really thought they could do better. Additionally, almost
as soon as the Lazy Bones hit the market, other
electronics companies started to make their own versions. So McDonald
really wanted something that could outperform all of those imitators.
(09:13):
And this is where Eugene Polly's inventive mind came up
with a solution. We don't talk about that solution after
we pause for a sponsor break. In nineteen fifty five,
Eugene Polly developed a product that became the flash Mattic.
(09:38):
The flash Matic used a beam of light to point
at sensors in the corners of the television to change
channels or activate the TV's power. It looked like a
ray gun or even the kind of gun you might
use to control a garden hose in terms of its form,
and that form factor was not an accident. Polly later
said in an interview that he chose that design quote
(09:59):
so people could shoot out the commercial. Polly's invention also
came equipped with what would become one of the most
important features of all remote control devices going forward, a
mute function. The flash Mattic was patented in Eugene Polly's
name under the title control system. The patent application notes
that it's trying to solve the danger issue of a
(10:22):
tethered remote quote. In the past, many different remote control
arrangements have been proposed for both radio and television receivers,
some of which have been exploited commercially. Most of these
remote control systems require physical interconnection between a remote control
station and the receiver, usually by a conductive wire or
(10:45):
multiconductor cable. Although some of these systems have been relatively
convenient and effective in operation, they are always subject to
the principal disadvantage that the wire or cable linking the
remote control station to the rec receiver is not particularly
attractive in appearance and may often cause accidents when laid
(11:06):
across a portion of the floor where people must walk,
which seems like would be most setups right most of
the time, the space between where you sit and your
television is where you walk to sit and watch television. Well.
Another technology that was also working this way around this
time was hearing aids that were connected physically to the
(11:28):
television that also or a tripping hazard. I did not
personally see these, but like one generation back from me
and my family were like my great grandparents with their
hearing aids that connected directly to the TV. Yeah, if
you had two of these things going on, I shudder
to think at the danger level you were dealing with.
(11:50):
And I say that in case that sounded funny with
entire sincerity, because yeah, I would trip over everything. Early
ads for the flash mat touted its revolutionary nature. One
such full page newspaper ad had the headline, now, a
flash of light without wires controls your Zenith TV from
(12:10):
across the room shoots off long, annoying commercials while picture
remains on screen. The rest of the ads copy explained
the device in more detail for consumers because this was
entirely new technology. Quote, Flashmatic tuning is built into the set.
It's a Zenith development. No other set has anything like it.
(12:31):
There are no wires, chords or connections of any kind.
You simply point the light from the flashmatic gun into
one of the four flashmatic windows. There's one window in
each corner of the picture frame. The flashmatic light turns
the set on or off, changes stations forward or backward,
shuts off annoying commercials. It's unbelievably simple to operate, harmless
(12:53):
to humans, and built to last a lifetime. Many of
the ads showed a beam of light that was going
from the remote all the way to the TV to
show consumers exactly what it was, and the accompanying copy
often called it quote a flash of magic light. The
price point noted in the ad we just read from
(13:15):
was somewhat staggering. For a twenty one inch Zenith Bismarck
model television that included this new technology, that was four
hundred and nine dollars and ninety five cents, which would
be roughly like five thousand dollars today, so clearly the
flash Mattic was considered a luxury item. Other similar ads
(13:36):
leaned into the convenience of this new invention, noting quote,
you can turn the set on and off from your chair.
One explained quote flashmatic is not an accessory or attachment.
Sensitive photo cells and Zenith's famous fully automatic Bullseye tuning
circuits combined to make this television work like magic. Despite
(13:59):
that high cost, which retailers addressed by letting people buy
new TVs on installment plans. Almost thirty thousand TVs equipped
with flash Mattos were sold. Eugene Polly got a one
thousand dollars bonus for the success of this new product. But,
as is often the case with a brand new technology,
(14:19):
the user experience in the real world revealed some problems
that just were not immediately apparent when this product was
tested in a lab. For one, there was just a
basic issue of user memory. You had to remember which
corner of the TV you had to shoot at for
any given function, and that was not particularly intuitive, so
(14:41):
people got kind of frustrated. But the bigger issue was
that having a technology that is triggered by light in
people's homes where there are a lot of potential light sources,
led to a lot of problems. If a household had
a particularly bright lamp in a room, turning it on
might change the or volume settings, or turn the set
(15:02):
on or off. Similarly, in cases where a home's windows
weren't covered by curtains or shutters, the intense light of
sunrise or sunset could also cause the TV to act
as though it had received a user input. So owners
of flashmatic sets had to carefully plan where their television
set would be placed in the home without any light
(15:23):
sources or mirrors that could reflect them in positions where
they might impact the television. Rooms also had to be
fairly dim for the flash Matic to work consistently, as
ambient light made it harder for the receptors in the
screen to detect the light beam from the remote pointed
at them. Seeing that this idea could be further refined,
(15:44):
McDonald asked for another team to come up with something different.
In addition to the need to create a device that
would eliminate the light sensitivity issues of the flash Maatic,
the company wanted whatever new device came about to not
require batter because apparently some users had panicked when the
batteries and their Flashmatic failed and they thought their entire
(16:08):
very expensive television set was broken, and that caused some
woes for the company. Yeah. I never found specifics, but
I envision like a company switchboard, just getting constant calls
of I spent so much money on this and now
it's broken, and them going, no, you need to replace
batteries sometimes because batteries being used and everything was also
(16:32):
not that common yet. So the year after Polly's invention
was finished, there was a second remote control developed at
Zenith This one, called a space Command, was the result
of a project led by researcher Robert Adler. Adler and
Polly are often characterized when this story is told because
(16:53):
of their differences so where Polly was from a poor
US family and had to leave college before he completed
his advanced degree to get a job. Adler, who was
born on December fourth, nineteen thirteen in Vienna, got his
PhD in physics from the University of Vienna in nineteen
thirty seven. After that he moved to the US and
(17:13):
then in nineteen forty one he was hired to work
at Zenith. In the years right after he joined the company,
a lot of Adler's focus was in military applications. World
War Two led to a lot of innovations, and Adler
worked on projects like electro mechanical filters and high frequency
oscillators that were used for radios in US military aircraft.
(17:37):
Like a lot of engineers, he worked on loan from
Zenith to the US military. Meanwhile, Eugene Polly was also
working on the war effort. His concentration was in bomb
fuses and radar technologies, and once the war was over, Adler,
like Polly, continued on at Zenith working in television technology,
(17:58):
and for Adler, a lot of his work focused on
improving reception in picture and in a lot of cases
Adler implemented and drew from concepts that he had just
finished working on in his military radio work. There's one
newspaper reference that states that Adler was the person who
actually led the creation of the Lazybones tethered remote, but
it doesn't seem as though that's accurate. In the twenty
(18:21):
fifteen book Remote Control by Caitlin Benson Allett, the author
states that no one at Zenith seemed to know who
precisely came up with the Lazy Bones. According to some
write ups about early remote control history, Eugene McDonald went
directly to Adler to come up with something that solved
the problems of the flash mattic. That's another one that's unclear.
(18:44):
But Adler's team developed the Space Command and the design
of it was very different from Polly's remote. The Space
Command relied on high frequency chimes. The first model contained
two lightweight aluminum rods within the unit. A year user
pressed one of the buttons, the corresponding rod was struck
and the resulting ultrasonic noise would send a sound wave
(19:07):
that a microphone and receiver in the television picked up.
Depending on which wave that was, the channel was changed
or the sound was turned off. After the first model,
a four rod version was made, which could turn channels
up or down, turn sound on or off, or switch
the power on or off. If you're old enough to
(19:29):
have heard a remote control called a clicker that comes
from the clicking of the buttons on the space command,
although the sound that carried the signal was not generally
perceptible to human ears. Before the idea for aluminum rods,
one of the technologies that Adler had considered was the
use of radio waves, a natural thought given how much
(19:51):
of his prior work had been done in that field,
But he had quickly realized that because radio waves could
travel through objects, there isn't a way to ensure that
your remote control was not going to change your neighbor's
TV channel or the volume of the sound. Yeah, the
sound waves got dampened by the walls of the house,
(20:13):
but not so sort of like people's neighbors baby monitors
picking up on one another. Yeah, same problem. And unlike
the gun design of the flash Mattic, the Space Command
was a small rectangular box with switches that were labeled
for their function. Adler's team had solved all of the
problems of the earlier model and without the need for
(20:35):
batteries as requested, and this device worked consistently. There are
some stories of these sound based remotes being affected by
sounds in the home, like keys or pet tags jingling,
or even coins clicking together, but there are also accounts
that attribute those problems not to the Space Command but
(20:57):
to knockoffs of it that started appearing on the market.
Adler's remote went to market so soon after the Flash
Mattic that one of the incentives that was offered to
consumers was the chance to trade in your flash Madic
enabled TV for a new Space Command model. Zenith also
offered the Space Command technology on a wider range of
(21:18):
TV sets, so consumers could still get a remote control
if their budget did not allow for a full sized picture.
ADS touted quote no electricity, no batteries or fuel of
any kind, no wires, no tubes, no transistors, no radio
waves that might interfere with the set next door. Some
(21:38):
even included the note no flashlights. Nineteen fifty seven. Ad
even featured George Burns and Gracie Allen as celebrity spokespeople
for the space Command. Yeah. Just to be clear too,
that trade in was not like a freeb You would
just get a lot of credit torture new television if
(21:58):
you had just bought a flash matic Delewis. Zenith was
not giving away new TVs. But coming up, we're going
to talk about how Eugene Polly felt about things when
Adler's invention was produced. But first we will hear from
the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
(22:24):
Zenith put all of its advertising power behind Adler's design,
and as a consequence, Adler got a lot of attention
as the father of the remote control and that was
something that bothered Eugene Polly from the beginning. He had
pioneered the remote control space in a lot of ways,
but he felt left out of the story as he
watched Adler give interviews and get awards. Adler was given
(22:48):
the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award of the Institute of Radio
Engineers in nineteen fifty eight because of it. Polly later
told a reporter quote, a father has to be present
at conception, and if you're not, you're not the father.
Even in the existing Zenith web page that still exists today,
in the list of the company's milestones, it lists the
(23:10):
two devices this way nineteen fifty five, first wireless TV
remote control, flash Matic nineteen fifty six, first practical wireless
TV remote control, Space Command. In the twenty five years
that followed the Space Command's introduction, Zenith Solder reported nine
million of the ultrasonic remote controls. During that time, Zenith
(23:35):
had to fend off a lot of imitators. Just two
years after the Space Command's introduction, Zenith sued the Admiral
Corporation for patent infringement. Admiral was not new to the
remote control game, but after the Space Command was released,
the company altered its sn R remote and even hired
(23:55):
a former Zenith engineer to work on it. Admiral lost
that suit, but it was not the only company that
tried to copy the design. A lot of those copycats, though,
were not nearly as effective, and Zenith continued to dominate
the market. Within six years of the introduction of the
Space Command, Robert Adler had become the vice president and
(24:17):
director of Research at Zenith, and he stayed in that
role for more than fifteen years before retiring in nineteen
seventy nine. But even after retirement, he remained involved with Zenith,
and he served as a consultant for the company until
the late nineteen nineties. Polly retired from Zenith in nineteen
eighty two, after almost fifty years with the company. Some
(24:39):
accounts listed nineteen eighty two as the year both he
and Adler retired. By the time he ended his career,
Eugene Polly was a widower, having lost his wife Blanche
in nineteen seventy six. He lived with his daughter Joan
in Lombard, Illinois, until Jones's death in two thousand and eight.
Ultrasonic technology was what everyone was doing for for twenty
(25:00):
five years, but it didn't remain the standard for remote controls.
In the nineteen eighties, around the same time that Polly
and Adler were retiring, a Canadian company called view Star
developed the infrared remote control. Zenith partnered with Ustar to
produce and market the device, and this was in part
(25:21):
a reaction to other technological developments. When there was only
a small range of channels a person could watch, a
simple up and down channel changer was great, but as
cable and satellite television services expanded the channel lineup from
like thirteen into dozens and even hundreds of possible options.
(25:41):
A new remote technology was clearly needed, and this was
a significant jump in requirements. They needed more detailed input,
like a numeric keypad so viewers could just type in
channel numbers rather than scrolling through hundreds of them. Also
the capability to select different potential av inputs like cable boxes,
(26:04):
LaserDisc players, that kind of thing. I remember when I
was a kid and we had a VCR and an ATARI.
We had a physical little switch that we flipped back
and forth to do this. Infrared fit the bill of
providing all of those different options. It enabled remotes to
use pulse coding, that's binary. Each coded transmission has segments
(26:26):
of light and absence of light that make up its signature,
and each signature is unique to the assigned function. That
light is pointed at the receiver, just like that the
human eye does not perceive. So the remotes we use
today are actually closer to Polly's flash mattic than to
Adler's space command. In nineteen ninety seven, the National Academy
(26:47):
of Television, Arts and Sciences gave an Emmy for pioneering
development of wireless remote controls for consumer television, and both
Polly and Adler jointly received that recognition of them Orton's
of the remote control's invention. In two thousand, are write
up in The Baltimore Sun celebrated fifty years of the
(27:07):
remote control, and in that article, Polly told the paper quote,
it makes me think maybe my life wasn't wasted. Maybe
I did something for humanity, like the guy who invented
the flush toilet. Although Polly stated in his interview for
the article that he and Adler were feuding, Zenith's historian
John Taylor downplayed any conflict, stating quote, I think the
(27:30):
feud is way overblown. One invention lasted one year, the
other twenty five years. The industry generally considers Bob Adler
the father of the remote control. Remember the name John Taylor,
because he's going to come up again in just a bit.
In a two thousand and four interview, Adler commented on
his impact in the creation of modern television culture. He
(27:53):
stated quote, people ask me all the time, don't you
feel guilty for it? And I say that's ridiculous. It
seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where
you normally sit and watch television. Robert Adler died on
February fifteenth, two thousand and seven, and before he died,
he said that he felt that Polly had not gotten
(28:14):
enough credit for his innovations in the remote control. He
noted in a two thousand and six interview quote, I
don't believe it has a single father, but the general
public wants one name to attach to something. Adler also
downplayed the importance of the invention overall, saying he that's
Adler had invented other things that he thought were more important. Additionally,
(28:38):
according to a quote his widow, Ingrid Adler, gave to
the press in the wake of his death, Adler was
not much of a TV watcher himself. She told reporters quote,
he was more of a reader. He was a man
who would dream in the night and wake up and
say I just solved a problem. He was always thinking science.
While Polly had always wanted more recognition for inventing one
(29:01):
of the earliest remote controls, Adler is said to have
always wanted less. He felt that he invented a lot
of other things that were more important, and he continued
to invent right up until his death. The last patent
application he filed was for a touch screen technology, and
that patent was pending when he died. He had really
(29:21):
been a prolific inventor. Adler had more than one hundred
and fifty patents to his name. Yeah, the exact number
eluded me. I saw some articles that said like one
hundred and twenty, others one hundred and eighty. And then
when you go looking, there are so many Robert Adlers
that do that have patents, and sometimes they get lumped
(29:42):
together as though they're one person. That I was like,
I don't have time to sort through this, so, but
it was a lot. Although Adler did not think the
remote control was all that important, Eugene Polyscher did. He
told a reporter when he was interviewed following Adler's death, quote,
this this is the greatest thing since the wheel. We
did something for humanity. Polly also had quite a few patents,
(30:07):
although not nearly as many as Adler. Polly had eighteen.
One of those was for a push button radio that
was used in cars. Eugene Polly lived several years after
Adler's death, and Polly died from pneumonia in twenty twelve
in Downersgrove, Illinois. After his death, the Los Angeles Times
(30:27):
ran an article about him and included quotes from Zenith
historian John Taylor, who had different messaging than he did
when speaking to The Baltimore Sun twelve years earlier. This
time he acknowledged Polly's importance while also kind of straddling
the line regarding the issue of attribution that Polly had
(30:48):
felt left out of for so many years. This time,
Taylor stated, quote, it's hard to even fathom the world
today without the remote control. Today it's not a luxury,
it's not a convenience, it's an assse. I think there's
no question that Gene Polly is the father of the
wireless remote control. There are some news reports that made
it seem like he was overshadowed by doctor Robert Adler.
(31:11):
Zenith has always considered them the co inventors. And another statement,
Taylor noted that Eugene always carried one of his splash
maattics around with him to show people, and that he
also loved new technology, saying quote, he was a proud
owner of a flat screen TV and a modern remote. Yeah.
The messaging kind of changed there from one Lass in
(31:32):
one year one twenty five. Robert Edler is a father too.
We always thought both of them were really the fathers.
It's fine. As for Zenith, in the autumn of nineteen
ninety five, LG Electronics Incorporated became the major shareholder of Zenith.
The Zenith brand had a refresh in nineteen ninety seven,
(31:52):
but then restructured completely in nineteen ninety nine, and by
the end of that year it became a fully owned
subsidies of LG. In two thousand, Motorola acquired Zenus Network
Systems Division in an effort to quote strengthen its digital
satellite business by expanding its product lines and customer base,
particularly in the international marketplace. Today Zenith exists, but it
(32:18):
is LG's research and development branch, operating out of a
laboratory building in Lincolnshire, Illinois. It's now essentially impossible to
buy a new television that works without a remote control.
More than forty million televisions are sold in the US annually,
with that number expected to reach fifty million by twenty
(32:39):
twenty three, and all of them ship with remotes. Plus
remotes are also sold separately for replacements or specialty uses
such as universal remotes. This is a far cry from
the thirty thousand units of the flash Mattic that's sold
in the nineteen fifties. Yeah. Now, I can't imagine buying
a TV at not having remote in the box. Yeah,
(33:01):
mine our TV, I don't think you can. Yeah, Like,
our TV technically has buttons, but they're so built in
to the like you can't even tell where they are.
You have to know and fish around for them if
you want to touch a button for some reason. Well,
and a lot of them have migrated to like the
under edge of the screen or even in some cases
(33:23):
right behind it. Yeah. So they're basically like, don't touch
the buttons. You don't know what you do? No, Yeah,
just don't mess with it. Don't mess with it. We
can whax so rhapsodic about this on Friday. Yeah, I
have a listener mail which is about an episode that
you did, but it is referring to behind the scenes
things that I said. This is from our listener Kyle,
(33:45):
who writes, perhaps you'll get a lot of emails about this,
and hopefully most, if not all, of them are not angry.
I just wanted to throw out there that when I
wanted to get a vasectomy. The doctor wanted to know
my wife was involved in the decision too. The way
I took it is that if you're married, usually should
be making this decision together and not secretly doing it
without your spouse's knowledge. Though I can't think of instances
(34:06):
where this is not the case, but I took it
as them wanting to confirm that I'm not making a
decision that will affect the whole family without at least
my wife's knowledge. However, that being said, it does seem
much more culturally acceptable for men to make this decision
than women, and I'm sure there is often a but
why don't you want to be a mother? Undertow and
that men don't get so Hopefully the doctors you spoke
(34:27):
to mainly wanted to confirm that this was something agreed
to by both spouses and not something hidden, though again
I know men and women are treated differently in these areas,
to the women's detriment. I love the podcast and listen
all the time. Kyle Kyle. I love this email, and
here's why, because you are right on the button. There
is a lot of I have a thing, and admittedly
(34:48):
this is my soapbox. I don't want to make anybody
mad or feel like I am in any way denigrating
anybody's choices. But there is a thing that happens when
you are not a woman who wants kids, where you
have to explain why all the time. And I will
say this, and again I'm not saying this. This isn't
(35:09):
a trick to like make anybody feel bad. But when
you ask a parent, why did you want kids, they're
often a little stymied as to the answer. Uh huh.
And but nobody ever asked that question is why? Yeah,
it's always the other way around. So simultaneously kind of
alluded to in this email, if somebody is trying to
(35:33):
get a tubul ligation and they have not had a
child and they're very young, it can be a laborious,
uphill process to get any doctor to agree with that.
That was me, Yeah, that was you. And like for
people who are not in a relationship with anyone will
go to a doctor and the like the question is not,
(35:56):
you know, I would like to get a tubule ligation. Great,
when we can we schedule this? Like do you have
medical contraindications for doing this of any sort? It's that like, oh,
are you sure you're not going to change your mind? Oh,
are you sure you're not going to want kids later? Oh?
What if you get married and your husband wants kids.
It is a huge uphill battle specifically for tubal ligations
(36:17):
in a way that does not apply to vasectomies, Like
if a young person wants to go get a vasectomy,
a lot of times it's like, okay, we're on board
with that, And so there's a gender difference going on there.
For sure, I did not have to personally deal with
this because when I wanted a long term birth control option,
(36:38):
I went with an IUD, and my primary care doctor
referred me to a gynecologist who only did gynecology, not
gynecology and obstetrics, right, And her focus was totally on
like the gynecological aspect of it, And there was no
kind of like supposition that my partner needed to be involved.
(37:03):
And since it is more reversible to have an IUD
than to have a tubeligation, like that was just not
part of the conversation. Yeah, And I will say when
I had the like discussions, it wasn't is your husband
okay with this? It was we need to schedule your
husband to come in and talk to us like it
(37:26):
wasn't enough for me to go Yeah, he's totally on board. Listen,
we're both the youngest in the family. We barely can
tie our own shoes, like we do not need to
be in charge of other people. It was literally like
he needs to physically be here and have the discussion right,
which Brian found hilarious because it is very silly. I
(37:46):
will say too, this is like an overshare. But the
tube legation I got was a different method than I
think is super common. This may have changed in the
this was quite a number of years ago, but I
will tell you why. I don't know how common it
is still because I have clamps. It's not the tie
(38:08):
off of the tubes. It's a clamp that closes the
tube up. And then the idea is that if you
change your mind within like a few years, they could
potentially reverse it, but if you don't, it will just
scar over and become more and more permanent. Sounds fine
to me, and I know when I had it it
(38:30):
was not common at all because my doctor at the
time was kind of pioneering in that usage. But the
reason I think it is still not all that common
is that when I have had X rays, MRI, et cetera.
In recent years, they'll go, there's something in your abdomen
and I'm like, yep, it's clamps. I mean they're little tiny,
(38:51):
it's like a little tiny plastic, almost like the way
a handcuff works, but like Barbie size. It has come
up several times, and I'm like, if it's uncommon enough
that the modern radiology texts, doctors in some cases that
I'm talking to are like, hey, what's that in your
apt Yeah, I'm presuming it's not still the most common way,
(39:14):
but right, it's a weird thing. It's a weird thing. Yeah. Yeah.
I also, you know, listen, there is the other outlier
case that I think is important in all of this
to mention, where there are people who may be in
relationships where they feel very trapped and potentially unsafe and
(39:38):
they do not want a child. Yeah, and in that
case to bring a spouse in could be very very dangerous,
extremely Yeah. And that's why I think, like, I don't
want to talk around that and not directly say this
is a case issue where like doctors need to understand
and it's tricky because a lot of women are not
(39:59):
going to be. I mean, a lot of people would
not be willing to say, hey, my partner is abusive
or dangerous and I'm so scared I want to have
this done. But if they don't say that and then
that person comes in, you're putting them in incredibly harmful circumstances. Right,
So this is one of the many ways that I
think people aren't thinking about why that conversation is a problem. Yeah,
(40:24):
but Kyle, thank you for your your thoughtful thing, and
you're right. People don't don't do the same thing with dudes.
I even had two of the doctors that I talked
to you before I found the doctor who became my
regular doctor, who was like, okay, if and she asked,
is you know is your husband on board? She asked
me questions like is your household safe? Are you doing
(40:45):
this for a reason? Like I was like, okay, she
gets it. Yeah, I think do you feel safe at home?
Has become a standard screening question in a lot of
medical practices. That is something that my doctor asks me
every time I'm there. Yeah, but was definitely not always
the case. Is twenty two thousand, what year did I
have that done? I don't know. Here's two thousand was
(41:09):
not as common then, so that was like I said,
she's a little cutting edge in many ways. But the
other two even said, well then why isn't your husband
considering of a sectomy? Like my value would go down
if I wasn't able to make babies. Yeah, it's a
very fraught topic. It's very hard to talk about because
(41:31):
everybody that chooses a different path will sometimes feel like
their choice is being attacked. I just know what's right
for me. I'm not used for anybody else, right, everybody'd
be cool. If you would like to write to us,
you could do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, where you'll get
(41:52):
history and surprise discussions of you know, sterilization and parenting choices,
you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(42:13):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio. Hello Owen, Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. This is another
one of those episodes that was intended to be an assortment,
(00:23):
a collection of things, and then it became about just
one of those things. Yeah. I was planning to write
about three or maybe four very mundane things that we
use every day in our lives and their origins. But
then when I got to the story of the TV
remote control, I discovered there was a drama. Uh. In
(00:45):
some ways, it's a one sided drama, but we'll talk
about it. This is one that's really relatable, I think
probably for anyone that has worked for a big company
and has felt like their contributions are lauded one moment
and forgotten the next. I think a lot of us
can relate to that. But it is also a story
about how two very different people perceive their work in
(01:06):
the same space, and how, in some cases that work
is perceived differently over time by those around them and
even their employer. The initial time period where a TV
remote control was being developed was actually pretty short. We
recently talked about spray paint and how that had multiple
(01:26):
options of people that get credited as the person that
are over literal decades. But this is like within eighteen months,
two people emerged, each of whom sometimes are called the
father of the remote control and one of those versions
that they created quickly supplanted the other. So we're going
to talk about those very early years and the way
(01:47):
that two inventors who were pivotal to the story have
been talked about in different ways by the company that
they both worked for. So we're starting a little earlier
than that, which is that in eighteen ninety eight, Nikola
Tesla received a patent for a remote control device. His
patent called this method of and apparatus for controlling mechanism
(02:10):
of moving vessels or vehicles. This invention was for quote,
controlling from a distance the operation of the propelling engines,
the steering apparatus and other mechanism carried by moving bodies
or floating vessels, of which the following is a specification
reference being had to the drawings accompanying and forming part
(02:30):
of the same That remote is not specifically germane to
the technology that we're talking about today, but it's illustrative
of the ways that people were thinking about using remote
controls well before televisions were even invented. We talked about
TV's invention in our twenty thirteen episode on Filot Farnsworth,
(02:54):
So jumping ahead from that moment more than one hundred years.
A two thousand and six write up about Eugene Polly
in the Atlantic City newspaper The Press reads, quote, fifty
years ago, Polly invented the wireless remote. In return, he
got one thousand dollars and a lifetime of gnawing irritation
at being squeezed out of pop culture history. Now he's
(03:18):
trying to set the record straight. And in that article,
Polly told the paper quote, not only did I not
get credit for doing anything, I got a kick in
the rear. So I stumbled upon this and said, what
is the backstory here? Suggest that there was drama? M
Eugene Theodore Polly was born on November twenty ninth, nineteen fifteen,
(03:41):
in Chicago. His mother, Vera Wachowski, was from a wealthy family,
but his father was a bootlegger. When Eugene was born,
Vera's family had cut off most contact with her because
of her connection to Eugene's father, but his father did
not stay around either. The two of them were separated
when Eugene was still really young. This is often described
(04:05):
as his father abandoning Vera and Eugene. His father's first
name is really never mentioned in any accounts of Eugene's life,
and later Eugene started using his confirmation name of Joseph
as his middle name. Yeah. I don't know if Theodore
was perhaps tied to his father in any way. That's
(04:26):
sheer speculation on my part, but there is definitely an
unwillingness to include any of that kind of discussion in
any stories of his life. Finances were very, very tight,
but Vera and Eugene got by together. And Eugene was
very clearly a super smart kid. He just had a
mind for all things mechanical. And after high school he
(04:48):
attended City Colleges of Chicago and then he went on
to the Armor Institute to study engineering. The Armor Institute
is the Illinois Institute of Technology today. But Polly wasn't
able to finish his studies and he didn't get his
engineering degree. The depression was making life harder and harder,
and his mother just needed help keeping their life together financially,
(05:11):
so Eugene joined the workforce. In nineteen thirty five, twenty
year old Eugene got hired by Zenith Radio Corporation and
he started there as a parts clerk. He didn't stay
in the stock room, though, he was eventually able to
move into the company's engineering department, and then he kept
moving up from there. He became a product engineer and
(05:33):
eventually moved into management and the mechanical engineering group. Zena's founder,
another Eugene. That's Eugene McDonald, started pushing his engineers to
come up with something that would enable viewers to not
have to endure commercials. This was in nineteen fifty. Apparently McDonald,
who had the nickname the Commander by his employees, uh,
(05:55):
just hated commercials and he figured most other viewers did too.
That's usually how this is reported, and it sounds like
kind of a feel good story about a captain of
industry fighting for the interests of his consumers. But it's
a little more complicated than that. McDonald thought that ad
supported television was not going to last, and moreover, he
(06:17):
did not want it to last, and that was in
part because Zenith was developing an early pay per view
business model, which would have competed with ad supported programming
where viewers did not have to pay directly to watch things.
Of course, his take on the potential of commercial driven
television proved wildly incorrect. There were radio remote controls of
(06:41):
various types going back to the nineteen twenties before the
rise of television, and they had evolved and improved significantly
over just a couple of decades, so it seemed like
there had to be a way to control a TV
with the remote too. There had already been an attempt
to control a TV remotely, but it was not really
all that helpful. That product was the Telezoom, which came
(07:04):
out in nineteen forty eight, and as that name suggests,
it let viewers zoom in on the picture. That was
the only thing that it did. I often zoom in
on pictures on my phone. I can see times you
might want to do that on TV. Not that many times.
(07:24):
It did not really take off. Yeah, it's tricky. I
have seen some explanations that suggest that the idea for
it was that TV's were so small at the time
that people would want to zoom in. But I'm like, yeah,
but it's a moving picture, so like what you zoom
in on, yeah, may not be germane to the story.
It's a it's a moving picture. And the image quality
(07:46):
was also limited enough that it seems like zooming in
would quickly just be like blobs. Yeah, I could see why.
It was not a rousing success. But the first invention
that came out of the Zenith Engineering group to solve
this problem of being able to silence commercials with something
called a lazy Bones, which I love. This was a
(08:08):
very simple remote. It was intended really just to silence
the TV during commercials, and Zenith advertised it that way,
hoping that it would help to hamper the use of
commercials and kind of kneecap commercial television. After all, if
consumers didn't hear the ad messaging, what was the point.
The Lazybones advertising encouraged viewers quote television fans have fun.
(08:32):
Sit back in your chair, relax, keep Zeni's new Lazybone
remote control handy to change stations, Press lightly with your
thumb and presto, there's the program you want. But the
Lazy Bones was not a wireless device. It had a
cable that users had to connect to their television and
it could turn the set on or off, or change
(08:53):
the channels, and it also was really good at tripping people.
Eugene McDonald really thought they could do better. Additionally, almost
as soon as the Lazy Bones hit the market, other
electronics companies started to make their own versions. So McDonald
really wanted something that could outperform all of those imitators.
(09:13):
And this is where Eugene Polly's inventive mind came up
with a solution. We don't talk about that solution after
we pause for a sponsor break. In nineteen fifty five,
Eugene Polly developed a product that became the flash Mattic.
(09:38):
The flash Matic used a beam of light to point
at sensors in the corners of the television to change
channels or activate the TV's power. It looked like a
ray gun or even the kind of gun you might
use to control a garden hose in terms of its form,
and that form factor was not an accident. Polly later
said in an interview that he chose that design quote
(09:59):
so people could shoot out the commercial. Polly's invention also
came equipped with what would become one of the most
important features of all remote control devices going forward, a
mute function. The flash Mattic was patented in Eugene Polly's
name under the title control system. The patent application notes
that it's trying to solve the danger issue of a
(10:22):
tethered remote quote. In the past, many different remote control
arrangements have been proposed for both radio and television receivers,
some of which have been exploited commercially. Most of these
remote control systems require physical interconnection between a remote control
station and the receiver, usually by a conductive wire or
(10:45):
multiconductor cable. Although some of these systems have been relatively
convenient and effective in operation, they are always subject to
the principal disadvantage that the wire or cable linking the
remote control station to the rec receiver is not particularly
attractive in appearance and may often cause accidents when laid
(11:06):
across a portion of the floor where people must walk,
which seems like would be most setups right most of
the time, the space between where you sit and your
television is where you walk to sit and watch television. Well.
Another technology that was also working this way around this
time was hearing aids that were connected physically to the
(11:28):
television that also or a tripping hazard. I did not
personally see these, but like one generation back from me
and my family were like my great grandparents with their
hearing aids that connected directly to the TV. Yeah, if
you had two of these things going on, I shudder
to think at the danger level you were dealing with.
(11:50):
And I say that in case that sounded funny with
entire sincerity, because yeah, I would trip over everything. Early
ads for the flash mat touted its revolutionary nature. One
such full page newspaper ad had the headline, now, a
flash of light without wires controls your Zenith TV from
(12:10):
across the room shoots off long, annoying commercials while picture
remains on screen. The rest of the ads copy explained
the device in more detail for consumers because this was
entirely new technology. Quote, Flashmatic tuning is built into the set.
It's a Zenith development. No other set has anything like it.
(12:31):
There are no wires, chords or connections of any kind.
You simply point the light from the flashmatic gun into
one of the four flashmatic windows. There's one window in
each corner of the picture frame. The flashmatic light turns
the set on or off, changes stations forward or backward,
shuts off annoying commercials. It's unbelievably simple to operate, harmless
(12:53):
to humans, and built to last a lifetime. Many of
the ads showed a beam of light that was going
from the remote all the way to the TV to
show consumers exactly what it was, and the accompanying copy
often called it quote a flash of magic light. The
price point noted in the ad we just read from
(13:15):
was somewhat staggering. For a twenty one inch Zenith Bismarck
model television that included this new technology, that was four
hundred and nine dollars and ninety five cents, which would
be roughly like five thousand dollars today, so clearly the
flash Mattic was considered a luxury item. Other similar ads
(13:36):
leaned into the convenience of this new invention, noting quote,
you can turn the set on and off from your chair.
One explained quote flashmatic is not an accessory or attachment.
Sensitive photo cells and Zenith's famous fully automatic Bullseye tuning
circuits combined to make this television work like magic. Despite
(13:59):
that high cost, which retailers addressed by letting people buy
new TVs on installment plans. Almost thirty thousand TVs equipped
with flash Mattos were sold. Eugene Polly got a one
thousand dollars bonus for the success of this new product. But,
as is often the case with a brand new technology,
(14:19):
the user experience in the real world revealed some problems
that just were not immediately apparent when this product was
tested in a lab. For one, there was just a
basic issue of user memory. You had to remember which
corner of the TV you had to shoot at for
any given function, and that was not particularly intuitive, so
(14:41):
people got kind of frustrated. But the bigger issue was
that having a technology that is triggered by light in
people's homes where there are a lot of potential light sources,
led to a lot of problems. If a household had
a particularly bright lamp in a room, turning it on
might change the or volume settings, or turn the set
(15:02):
on or off. Similarly, in cases where a home's windows
weren't covered by curtains or shutters, the intense light of
sunrise or sunset could also cause the TV to act
as though it had received a user input. So owners
of flashmatic sets had to carefully plan where their television
set would be placed in the home without any light
(15:23):
sources or mirrors that could reflect them in positions where
they might impact the television. Rooms also had to be
fairly dim for the flash Matic to work consistently, as
ambient light made it harder for the receptors in the
screen to detect the light beam from the remote pointed
at them. Seeing that this idea could be further refined,
(15:44):
McDonald asked for another team to come up with something different.
In addition to the need to create a device that
would eliminate the light sensitivity issues of the flash Maatic,
the company wanted whatever new device came about to not
require batter because apparently some users had panicked when the
batteries and their Flashmatic failed and they thought their entire
(16:08):
very expensive television set was broken, and that caused some
woes for the company. Yeah. I never found specifics, but
I envision like a company switchboard, just getting constant calls
of I spent so much money on this and now
it's broken, and them going, no, you need to replace
batteries sometimes because batteries being used and everything was also
(16:32):
not that common yet. So the year after Polly's invention
was finished, there was a second remote control developed at
Zenith This one, called a space Command, was the result
of a project led by researcher Robert Adler. Adler and
Polly are often characterized when this story is told because
(16:53):
of their differences so where Polly was from a poor
US family and had to leave college before he completed
his advanced degree to get a job. Adler, who was
born on December fourth, nineteen thirteen in Vienna, got his
PhD in physics from the University of Vienna in nineteen
thirty seven. After that he moved to the US and
(17:13):
then in nineteen forty one he was hired to work
at Zenith. In the years right after he joined the company,
a lot of Adler's focus was in military applications. World
War Two led to a lot of innovations, and Adler
worked on projects like electro mechanical filters and high frequency
oscillators that were used for radios in US military aircraft.
(17:37):
Like a lot of engineers, he worked on loan from
Zenith to the US military. Meanwhile, Eugene Polly was also
working on the war effort. His concentration was in bomb
fuses and radar technologies, and once the war was over, Adler,
like Polly, continued on at Zenith working in television technology,
(17:58):
and for Adler, a lot of his work focused on
improving reception in picture and in a lot of cases
Adler implemented and drew from concepts that he had just
finished working on in his military radio work. There's one
newspaper reference that states that Adler was the person who
actually led the creation of the Lazybones tethered remote, but
it doesn't seem as though that's accurate. In the twenty
(18:21):
fifteen book Remote Control by Caitlin Benson Allett, the author
states that no one at Zenith seemed to know who
precisely came up with the Lazy Bones. According to some
write ups about early remote control history, Eugene McDonald went
directly to Adler to come up with something that solved
the problems of the flash mattic. That's another one that's unclear.
(18:44):
But Adler's team developed the Space Command and the design
of it was very different from Polly's remote. The Space
Command relied on high frequency chimes. The first model contained
two lightweight aluminum rods within the unit. A year user
pressed one of the buttons, the corresponding rod was struck
and the resulting ultrasonic noise would send a sound wave
(19:07):
that a microphone and receiver in the television picked up.
Depending on which wave that was, the channel was changed
or the sound was turned off. After the first model,
a four rod version was made, which could turn channels
up or down, turn sound on or off, or switch
the power on or off. If you're old enough to
(19:29):
have heard a remote control called a clicker that comes
from the clicking of the buttons on the space command,
although the sound that carried the signal was not generally
perceptible to human ears. Before the idea for aluminum rods,
one of the technologies that Adler had considered was the
use of radio waves, a natural thought given how much
(19:51):
of his prior work had been done in that field,
But he had quickly realized that because radio waves could
travel through objects, there isn't a way to ensure that
your remote control was not going to change your neighbor's
TV channel or the volume of the sound. Yeah, the
sound waves got dampened by the walls of the house,
(20:13):
but not so sort of like people's neighbors baby monitors
picking up on one another. Yeah, same problem. And unlike
the gun design of the flash Mattic, the Space Command
was a small rectangular box with switches that were labeled
for their function. Adler's team had solved all of the
problems of the earlier model and without the need for
(20:35):
batteries as requested, and this device worked consistently. There are
some stories of these sound based remotes being affected by
sounds in the home, like keys or pet tags jingling,
or even coins clicking together, but there are also accounts
that attribute those problems not to the Space Command but
(20:57):
to knockoffs of it that started appearing on the market.
Adler's remote went to market so soon after the Flash
Mattic that one of the incentives that was offered to
consumers was the chance to trade in your flash Madic
enabled TV for a new Space Command model. Zenith also
offered the Space Command technology on a wider range of
(21:18):
TV sets, so consumers could still get a remote control
if their budget did not allow for a full sized picture.
ADS touted quote no electricity, no batteries or fuel of
any kind, no wires, no tubes, no transistors, no radio
waves that might interfere with the set next door. Some
(21:38):
even included the note no flashlights. Nineteen fifty seven. Ad
even featured George Burns and Gracie Allen as celebrity spokespeople
for the space Command. Yeah. Just to be clear too,
that trade in was not like a freeb You would
just get a lot of credit torture new television if
(21:58):
you had just bought a flash matic Delewis. Zenith was
not giving away new TVs. But coming up, we're going
to talk about how Eugene Polly felt about things when
Adler's invention was produced. But first we will hear from
the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
(22:24):
Zenith put all of its advertising power behind Adler's design,
and as a consequence, Adler got a lot of attention
as the father of the remote control and that was
something that bothered Eugene Polly from the beginning. He had
pioneered the remote control space in a lot of ways,
but he felt left out of the story as he
watched Adler give interviews and get awards. Adler was given
(22:48):
the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award of the Institute of Radio
Engineers in nineteen fifty eight because of it. Polly later
told a reporter quote, a father has to be present
at conception, and if you're not, you're not the father.
Even in the existing Zenith web page that still exists today,
in the list of the company's milestones, it lists the
(23:10):
two devices this way nineteen fifty five, first wireless TV
remote control, flash Matic nineteen fifty six, first practical wireless
TV remote control, Space Command. In the twenty five years
that followed the Space Command's introduction, Zenith Solder reported nine
million of the ultrasonic remote controls. During that time, Zenith
(23:35):
had to fend off a lot of imitators. Just two
years after the Space Command's introduction, Zenith sued the Admiral
Corporation for patent infringement. Admiral was not new to the
remote control game, but after the Space Command was released,
the company altered its sn R remote and even hired
(23:55):
a former Zenith engineer to work on it. Admiral lost
that suit, but it was not the only company that
tried to copy the design. A lot of those copycats, though,
were not nearly as effective, and Zenith continued to dominate
the market. Within six years of the introduction of the
Space Command, Robert Adler had become the vice president and
(24:17):
director of Research at Zenith, and he stayed in that
role for more than fifteen years before retiring in nineteen
seventy nine. But even after retirement, he remained involved with Zenith,
and he served as a consultant for the company until
the late nineteen nineties. Polly retired from Zenith in nineteen
eighty two, after almost fifty years with the company. Some
(24:39):
accounts listed nineteen eighty two as the year both he
and Adler retired. By the time he ended his career,
Eugene Polly was a widower, having lost his wife Blanche
in nineteen seventy six. He lived with his daughter Joan
in Lombard, Illinois, until Jones's death in two thousand and eight.
Ultrasonic technology was what everyone was doing for for twenty
(25:00):
five years, but it didn't remain the standard for remote controls.
In the nineteen eighties, around the same time that Polly
and Adler were retiring, a Canadian company called view Star
developed the infrared remote control. Zenith partnered with Ustar to
produce and market the device, and this was in part
(25:21):
a reaction to other technological developments. When there was only
a small range of channels a person could watch, a
simple up and down channel changer was great, but as
cable and satellite television services expanded the channel lineup from
like thirteen into dozens and even hundreds of possible options.
(25:41):
A new remote technology was clearly needed, and this was
a significant jump in requirements. They needed more detailed input,
like a numeric keypad so viewers could just type in
channel numbers rather than scrolling through hundreds of them. Also
the capability to select different potential av inputs like cable boxes,
(26:04):
LaserDisc players, that kind of thing. I remember when I
was a kid and we had a VCR and an ATARI.
We had a physical little switch that we flipped back
and forth to do this. Infrared fit the bill of
providing all of those different options. It enabled remotes to
use pulse coding, that's binary. Each coded transmission has segments
(26:26):
of light and absence of light that make up its signature,
and each signature is unique to the assigned function. That
light is pointed at the receiver, just like that the
human eye does not perceive. So the remotes we use
today are actually closer to Polly's flash mattic than to
Adler's space command. In nineteen ninety seven, the National Academy
(26:47):
of Television, Arts and Sciences gave an Emmy for pioneering
development of wireless remote controls for consumer television, and both
Polly and Adler jointly received that recognition of them Orton's
of the remote control's invention. In two thousand, are write
up in The Baltimore Sun celebrated fifty years of the
(27:07):
remote control, and in that article, Polly told the paper quote,
it makes me think maybe my life wasn't wasted. Maybe
I did something for humanity, like the guy who invented
the flush toilet. Although Polly stated in his interview for
the article that he and Adler were feuding, Zenith's historian
John Taylor downplayed any conflict, stating quote, I think the
(27:30):
feud is way overblown. One invention lasted one year, the
other twenty five years. The industry generally considers Bob Adler
the father of the remote control. Remember the name John Taylor,
because he's going to come up again in just a bit.
In a two thousand and four interview, Adler commented on
his impact in the creation of modern television culture. He
(27:53):
stated quote, people ask me all the time, don't you
feel guilty for it? And I say that's ridiculous. It
seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where
you normally sit and watch television. Robert Adler died on
February fifteenth, two thousand and seven, and before he died,
he said that he felt that Polly had not gotten
(28:14):
enough credit for his innovations in the remote control. He
noted in a two thousand and six interview quote, I
don't believe it has a single father, but the general
public wants one name to attach to something. Adler also
downplayed the importance of the invention overall, saying he that's
Adler had invented other things that he thought were more important. Additionally,
(28:38):
according to a quote his widow, Ingrid Adler, gave to
the press in the wake of his death, Adler was
not much of a TV watcher himself. She told reporters quote,
he was more of a reader. He was a man
who would dream in the night and wake up and
say I just solved a problem. He was always thinking science.
While Polly had always wanted more recognition for inventing one
(29:01):
of the earliest remote controls, Adler is said to have
always wanted less. He felt that he invented a lot
of other things that were more important, and he continued
to invent right up until his death. The last patent
application he filed was for a touch screen technology, and
that patent was pending when he died. He had really
(29:21):
been a prolific inventor. Adler had more than one hundred
and fifty patents to his name. Yeah, the exact number
eluded me. I saw some articles that said like one
hundred and twenty, others one hundred and eighty. And then
when you go looking, there are so many Robert Adlers
that do that have patents, and sometimes they get lumped
(29:42):
together as though they're one person. That I was like,
I don't have time to sort through this, so, but
it was a lot. Although Adler did not think the
remote control was all that important, Eugene Polyscher did. He
told a reporter when he was interviewed following Adler's death, quote,
this this is the greatest thing since the wheel. We
did something for humanity. Polly also had quite a few patents,
(30:07):
although not nearly as many as Adler. Polly had eighteen.
One of those was for a push button radio that
was used in cars. Eugene Polly lived several years after
Adler's death, and Polly died from pneumonia in twenty twelve
in Downersgrove, Illinois. After his death, the Los Angeles Times
(30:27):
ran an article about him and included quotes from Zenith
historian John Taylor, who had different messaging than he did
when speaking to The Baltimore Sun twelve years earlier. This
time he acknowledged Polly's importance while also kind of straddling
the line regarding the issue of attribution that Polly had
(30:48):
felt left out of for so many years. This time,
Taylor stated, quote, it's hard to even fathom the world
today without the remote control. Today it's not a luxury,
it's not a convenience, it's an assse. I think there's
no question that Gene Polly is the father of the
wireless remote control. There are some news reports that made
it seem like he was overshadowed by doctor Robert Adler.
(31:11):
Zenith has always considered them the co inventors. And another statement,
Taylor noted that Eugene always carried one of his splash
maattics around with him to show people, and that he
also loved new technology, saying quote, he was a proud
owner of a flat screen TV and a modern remote. Yeah.
The messaging kind of changed there from one Lass in
(31:32):
one year one twenty five. Robert Edler is a father too.
We always thought both of them were really the fathers.
It's fine. As for Zenith, in the autumn of nineteen
ninety five, LG Electronics Incorporated became the major shareholder of Zenith.
The Zenith brand had a refresh in nineteen ninety seven,
(31:52):
but then restructured completely in nineteen ninety nine, and by
the end of that year it became a fully owned
subsidies of LG. In two thousand, Motorola acquired Zenus Network
Systems Division in an effort to quote strengthen its digital
satellite business by expanding its product lines and customer base,
particularly in the international marketplace. Today Zenith exists, but it
(32:18):
is LG's research and development branch, operating out of a
laboratory building in Lincolnshire, Illinois. It's now essentially impossible to
buy a new television that works without a remote control.
More than forty million televisions are sold in the US annually,
with that number expected to reach fifty million by twenty
(32:39):
twenty three, and all of them ship with remotes. Plus
remotes are also sold separately for replacements or specialty uses
such as universal remotes. This is a far cry from
the thirty thousand units of the flash Mattic that's sold
in the nineteen fifties. Yeah. Now, I can't imagine buying
a TV at not having remote in the box. Yeah,
(33:01):
mine our TV, I don't think you can. Yeah, Like,
our TV technically has buttons, but they're so built in
to the like you can't even tell where they are.
You have to know and fish around for them if
you want to touch a button for some reason. Well,
and a lot of them have migrated to like the
under edge of the screen or even in some cases
(33:23):
right behind it. Yeah. So they're basically like, don't touch
the buttons. You don't know what you do? No, Yeah,
just don't mess with it. Don't mess with it. We
can whax so rhapsodic about this on Friday. Yeah, I
have a listener mail which is about an episode that
you did, but it is referring to behind the scenes
things that I said. This is from our listener Kyle,
(33:45):
who writes, perhaps you'll get a lot of emails about this,
and hopefully most, if not all, of them are not angry.
I just wanted to throw out there that when I
wanted to get a vasectomy. The doctor wanted to know
my wife was involved in the decision too. The way
I took it is that if you're married, usually should
be making this decision together and not secretly doing it
without your spouse's knowledge. Though I can't think of instances
(34:06):
where this is not the case, but I took it
as them wanting to confirm that I'm not making a
decision that will affect the whole family without at least
my wife's knowledge. However, that being said, it does seem
much more culturally acceptable for men to make this decision
than women, and I'm sure there is often a but
why don't you want to be a mother? Undertow and
that men don't get so Hopefully the doctors you spoke
(34:27):
to mainly wanted to confirm that this was something agreed
to by both spouses and not something hidden, though again
I know men and women are treated differently in these areas,
to the women's detriment. I love the podcast and listen
all the time. Kyle Kyle. I love this email, and
here's why, because you are right on the button. There
is a lot of I have a thing, and admittedly
(34:48):
this is my soapbox. I don't want to make anybody
mad or feel like I am in any way denigrating
anybody's choices. But there is a thing that happens when
you are not a woman who wants kids, where you
have to explain why all the time. And I will
say this, and again I'm not saying this. This isn't
(35:09):
a trick to like make anybody feel bad. But when
you ask a parent, why did you want kids, they're
often a little stymied as to the answer. Uh huh.
And but nobody ever asked that question is why? Yeah,
it's always the other way around. So simultaneously kind of
alluded to in this email, if somebody is trying to
(35:33):
get a tubul ligation and they have not had a
child and they're very young, it can be a laborious,
uphill process to get any doctor to agree with that.
That was me, Yeah, that was you. And like for
people who are not in a relationship with anyone will
go to a doctor and the like the question is not,
(35:56):
you know, I would like to get a tubule ligation. Great,
when we can we schedule this? Like do you have
medical contraindications for doing this of any sort? It's that like, oh,
are you sure you're not going to change your mind? Oh,
are you sure you're not going to want kids later? Oh?
What if you get married and your husband wants kids.
It is a huge uphill battle specifically for tubal ligations
(36:17):
in a way that does not apply to vasectomies, Like
if a young person wants to go get a vasectomy,
a lot of times it's like, okay, we're on board
with that, And so there's a gender difference going on there.
For sure, I did not have to personally deal with
this because when I wanted a long term birth control option,
(36:38):
I went with an IUD, and my primary care doctor
referred me to a gynecologist who only did gynecology, not
gynecology and obstetrics, right, And her focus was totally on
like the gynecological aspect of it, And there was no
kind of like supposition that my partner needed to be involved.
(37:03):
And since it is more reversible to have an IUD
than to have a tubeligation, like that was just not
part of the conversation. Yeah, And I will say when
I had the like discussions, it wasn't is your husband
okay with this? It was we need to schedule your
husband to come in and talk to us like it
(37:26):
wasn't enough for me to go Yeah, he's totally on board. Listen,
we're both the youngest in the family. We barely can
tie our own shoes, like we do not need to
be in charge of other people. It was literally like
he needs to physically be here and have the discussion right,
which Brian found hilarious because it is very silly. I
(37:46):
will say too, this is like an overshare. But the
tube legation I got was a different method than I
think is super common. This may have changed in the
this was quite a number of years ago, but I
will tell you why. I don't know how common it
is still because I have clamps. It's not the tie
(38:08):
off of the tubes. It's a clamp that closes the
tube up. And then the idea is that if you
change your mind within like a few years, they could
potentially reverse it, but if you don't, it will just
scar over and become more and more permanent. Sounds fine
to me, and I know when I had it it
(38:30):
was not common at all because my doctor at the
time was kind of pioneering in that usage. But the
reason I think it is still not all that common
is that when I have had X rays, MRI, et cetera.
In recent years, they'll go, there's something in your abdomen
and I'm like, yep, it's clamps. I mean they're little tiny,
(38:51):
it's like a little tiny plastic, almost like the way
a handcuff works, but like Barbie size. It has come
up several times, and I'm like, if it's uncommon enough
that the modern radiology texts, doctors in some cases that
I'm talking to are like, hey, what's that in your
apt Yeah, I'm presuming it's not still the most common way,
(39:14):
but right, it's a weird thing. It's a weird thing. Yeah. Yeah.
I also, you know, listen, there is the other outlier
case that I think is important in all of this
to mention, where there are people who may be in
relationships where they feel very trapped and potentially unsafe and
(39:38):
they do not want a child. Yeah, and in that
case to bring a spouse in could be very very dangerous,
extremely Yeah. And that's why I think, like, I don't
want to talk around that and not directly say this
is a case issue where like doctors need to understand
and it's tricky because a lot of women are not
(39:59):
going to be. I mean, a lot of people would
not be willing to say, hey, my partner is abusive
or dangerous and I'm so scared I want to have
this done. But if they don't say that and then
that person comes in, you're putting them in incredibly harmful circumstances. Right,
So this is one of the many ways that I
think people aren't thinking about why that conversation is a problem. Yeah,
(40:24):
but Kyle, thank you for your your thoughtful thing, and
you're right. People don't don't do the same thing with dudes.
I even had two of the doctors that I talked
to you before I found the doctor who became my
regular doctor, who was like, okay, if and she asked,
is you know is your husband on board? She asked
me questions like is your household safe? Are you doing
(40:45):
this for a reason? Like I was like, okay, she
gets it. Yeah, I think do you feel safe at home?
Has become a standard screening question in a lot of
medical practices. That is something that my doctor asks me
every time I'm there. Yeah, but was definitely not always
the case. Is twenty two thousand, what year did I
have that done? I don't know. Here's two thousand was
(41:09):
not as common then, so that was like I said,
she's a little cutting edge in many ways. But the
other two even said, well then why isn't your husband
considering of a sectomy? Like my value would go down
if I wasn't able to make babies. Yeah, it's a
very fraught topic. It's very hard to talk about because
(41:31):
everybody that chooses a different path will sometimes feel like
their choice is being attacked. I just know what's right
for me. I'm not used for anybody else, right, everybody'd
be cool. If you would like to write to us,
you could do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, where you'll get
(41:52):
history and surprise discussions of you know, sterilization and parenting choices,
you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(42:13):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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