TV REMOTE CONTROL—EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY THINGS by Pooja Electronics
The goal of the “Extraordinary Ordinary Things” blog series is to explain how certain things have become so ingrained in our everyday lives that we rarely notice them, and then to show how they are truly dramatic. Examining a single outstanding ordinary thing frequently leads to a far bigger notion with practically incalculable societal implications. This is the case with the TV remote control in particular, as well as the broader idea of remote control in general.
We were watching a sitcom on TV not long ago. It depicted a family settling down to watch TV, but nothing occurred when one of the children tried to switch it on. “Perhaps the remote control’s batteries are dead,” one speculated. As a result, the batteries were replaced. The youngsters became concerned when nothing occurred. “How are we going to watch TV if the remote is broken?” “We’re sunk!”
The father then discreetly walked over to the television, clicked the red “on” button, and a picture came on the screen. The kids were taken aback. “Wow, dad! “How did you pull that off?”
“The television is on, but this isn’t the station we want,” the scream went up before he could respond. “We’re sunk!” The father then twisted a little wheel on the TV set until the appropriate station appeared on the screen. “Wow, dad!” I exclaim once again. “How did you pull that off?” “But it’s not loud enough; we can’t hear anything,” the shout went up again before he could respond. “We’re sunk!” The cacophony grew as the father cranked another wheel on the TV set. “Wow, dad,” was the reply once more. “How did you pull that off?”
This comedy, in which these events occurred, was most likely produced in the late 1980s when certain televisions could be enhanced with a remote control device while still having manual controls. This scenario would not be possible now because all television sets have remote controls and no manual controls.
No, not exactly. Modern televisions include manual controls. However, they are mostly hidden because, rather than being in plain sight, they are either hidden on the front or buried on the sides or rear of the set, making it impossible to utilize or even notice them.
Furthermore, manual controls allow for significantly fewer modifications to TV viewing than the nearly limitless alternatives provided by LCD\LED remote control. Imagine having to manually change the channel selection button from channel 6 to channel 78 rather than just entering the number 78 on the remote control!
The lesson of this story is that, while a TV remote control (also known as a “remote”) was previously considered a luxury, it is now considered a necessity. Without it, modern television viewing would be impossible. Furthermore, the TV remote control is representative of the remarkable developments in remote control technology in general for use in an almost limitless number of different sectors in just the last two or three decades. And things are moving along nicely.
As a result, I feel the TV remote control merits a spot on my list of “amazing ordinary objects.”
A Brief History of Television Remote Controls
Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, I recall a period when a TV remote control was never even considered, for the simple fact that most people didn’t own a television. For most of us who couldn’t afford a TV in our homes, watching TV meant getting out of bed, leaving the house, and praying that a program would be playing in the store’s window so we could stand outside and watch it.
By the middle of the 1950s, nearly every American home had a television set. These were large, unwieldy devices with little black-and-white displays. Although color television debuted in the United States in 1953, it was prohibitively expensive for most people, and color programming was exceedingly restricted. A TV remote control was not even a twinkle in the consumer’s eye at the time.
It was enough simply to have a television at all. It seemed that getting up to change the channel (of which there were only a few) or adjusting the volume was just part of the deal.
I recall my mother’s hearing loss being the closest thing to a TV remote control at this time. I used a cable to connect a pair of headphones to the TV’s loudspeaker so she could hear what was going on without disturbing the rest of us. This was not a true remote control because it did not control the sound coming from the television, but rather modified it as it reached the listener’s ears.
A circumstance that was uniquely American sparked the concept of a real TV DTH\ Setup Box remote control. Unlike much of the rest of the world, television broadcasting in the United States was a private company. The federal government (Federal Communication Commission) supervised TV transmission (as it did radio broadcasting before it), but its primary goal was commercial, i.e. to produce money. How can you monetize your broadcasting? With advertisements, advertisements, and more advertisements.
People had grown used to extensive radio advertising. Radio, on the other hand, did not need complete concentration; television did. As a result, dedicating 15-20 minutes every hour to advertising messaging became a tremendous burden.
While the advertising was unpleasant, America’s free enterprise broadcasting had some substantial advantages.
- Receiving radio and television transmissions was once free. There was no need to pay a government licensing fee.
- Second, the profit incentive stimulated the proliferation of radio and television stations. In the 1950s, I recall there being roughly 50 radio stations and 10 television stations in Los Angeles. Five or six radio stations and one or two television stations were the usual everywhere in the world.
- Third, radio and television broadcasting had little or no chance of becoming propaganda conduits for the federal government. In the United States, the concept of a public broadcasting system was frowned upon. Government radio and television broadcasts were only permitted in the 1970s. Even back then, public radio and television were (and still are) just one radio or television station among dozens of non-governmental broadcasters.
In the 1950s, Zenith Electronics’ president, Eugene F. McDonald, set a challenge for the company’s engineers. Make a gadget that could silence the advertising (which was sometimes aired at a louder volume than the main show) or switch to a different channel when anything other than advertisements was playing.
The challenge of Eugene McDonald triggered a revolution. Television viewers were no longer a captive (and frustrated) audience. They could change stations with the flip of a switch if they didn’t like what they were seeing. Advertisers and commercial broadcasters were not pleased; their earnings were on the line. But the crime was done, and there was no turning back.
This was not entirely a unique idea. There were existing devices on the market for changing TV stations remotely, notably Zenith’s proprietary Lazy-Bones controller. They did, however, have a handful of severe flaws. They were connected to the television through an inconvenient “umbilical cable” (electric wire). Furthermore, while they let the user switch the TV on and off as well as change stations, they did not allow the user to mute the obnoxious, at times deafening commercial messages.
Eugene Polley invented Zenith’s game-changing wireless technology, the Flashmatic, which was introduced in 1955. Because Polley was a mechanical engineer rather than an electrical engineer, his invention was mostly mechanical.
A directional light source with a sensor in each corner of the TV screen was employed by Flashmatic. This allowed the spectator to change stations by dialing a higher or lower number, as well as silence the sound. The Flasmatic’s biggest flaw was that the four sensors on the TV set were sensitive to more than simply the light beam thrown out by the viewer’s hand. “Depending on where the TV was positioned, once the sun came up, it would literally switch on the TV or change the stations,” says one TV historian.
The Flashmatic had a significant commercial disadvantage. The expense. The equipment, which resembled a child’s toy ray pistol, came with an eye-watering price tag of around $100. A brand new automobile could still be purchased for around $600 in the mid-1950s.
Zenith went back to the drawing board under the direction of scientist Robert Adler in quest of a totally electronic remote control rather than a partially mechanical one to improve dependability and cut costs. This would necessitate devising a whole new method for
the DVD/ Home theatre remote to communicate with the television.
Radio waves were one possibility. “If you were in an apartment building, you may start changing the channel on the next room’s TV as well as your own,” one researcher observed.
Adler came up with the idea of using sound, specifically “ultrasonic sound.” This is a sound that is above the human hearing range, usually exceeding 20,000 hertz (20 kilohertz). The Space Command, a Zenith ultrasonic remote, worked by hammers striking aluminum rods within the remote, which were precisely crafted to ring at specific frequencies, causing the TV to switch on or off, change the channel, or mute and unmute the sound.
The Space Command, like its largely mechanical forerunner, the Flashmatic, featured only a few functions controlled by only four buttons, making it simple to grasp and use. The buttons made a clicking sound when pressed, garnering the gadget the nickname “clicker,” a phrase for a television remote control that some people still use today.
The clicker ruled until the 1970s when developments in television transmission made it too simple to control new functions. The BBC (British Broadcasting Company) is credited with introducing Ceefax (pronounced “see facts”), a text-based service, in 1974, which helped to make the four-button remote obsolete.
Most viewers, however, were unable to access the pages of news, sports, financial, and other information available with only a four-button remote. A new remote with a numeric keypad was needed to call up the various page numbers and switch between the text service and standard TV watching.
To meet the increased demands, remote control designers had to devise a new method of interacting with the television. They picked infrared light, which has previously shown itself in other sectors. Because the infrared Car Audio remote was so quiet in comparison to prior generations, the term “clicker” rapidly faded.
The advent and proliferation of cable television in the 1980s and 1990s had perhaps the most significant impact on the evolution of the TV remote. There was also an explosion of ancillary devices to be linked to the TV, such as video recorders, DVD players, and gaming consoles, resulting in an increase in the number of buttons on the remote. Some models grew to reach 92 in number, making them unwieldy, complicated, and unappealing.
The Concept of Remote Control
Obviously, the TV remote is merely one form of remote control. Others include garage door openers and closers (clickers), car door locks and unlocks, robotic vacuum cleaners, flying drones, music sound systems, and so on.
The urge to have remote control over objects is perhaps as ancient as humans. Indeed, all physical advancements of human civilization, in one way or another, may be seen as a desire to make items that are vital to society more easily available at a distance.
A fundamental definition of “remote control” would be:
- Controlling an operation from a distance away is the concept.
- Practice. A gadget or system that allows you to control anything from afar.
As weird as it may seem, a road may be viewed as a type of remote control from this perspective. For example, if you are at point A and something important to you is situated at point B, a road would make it easier for you to go grab it (direct control) or send a message to someone who is already there to deliver it to you (remote control).
However, there are two flaws in this strange parallel. To begin with, there would be no means of knowing whether or not the communication had been received. Second, there would be no way of knowing whether or not someone or something at point B would respond as expected. Perhaps a better comparison would be the telephone.
We might now assure that the message is received at point B the instant someone there says “Hello” using a telephone. We couldn’t guarantee that the intended action at point B would be executed, though. Thus, “remote control” appears to have two key components: 1. an assurance that a message sent from one distant place to another is actually received, and 2. a guarantee that the remote location where the message is received reacts in the correct manner.
Expecting anything to be sure in the actual world is idealistic; things may always go wrong. The best we can aspire for is to lower the chance to nearly none. Given these idealistic aspirations and practical constraints, it’s possible that the contemporary CRT TV remote control first developed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. And that the following major steps were involved in its creation.
1894: Physicist Oliver Lodge uses a Branly coherer to induce a mirror galvanometer to move a beam of light when an electromagnetic wave is intentionally created, demonstrating the first example of remotely remote control.
1895: Jagadish Chandra Bose fires a cannon and rings a bell from a distance of 23 meters using microwaves (75 feet). The feat was accomplished by channeling the waves through a number of intervening walls to make the display extraordinarily believable.
Engineer Ernest Wilson utilizes radio waves to operate torpedoes and submarines remotely in 1897. Nikola Tesla files a patent for “An Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vehicle or Vehicles” in the United States in 1898. He uses radio waves to operate a boat, which he calls a “teleautomaton,” in public to showcase the idea.
1903. Leonardo Torres Quevedo shows off his “Telekino,” a robot that follows directions sent through electromagnetic waves. Torres Quevedo is credited with establishing the essential concepts of current wireless remote control as a result of this discovery.
Since Quevedo’s time (1903), the remote control has seen a series of important advancements, affecting nearly every facet of everyday life.
The first wireless remote-controlled model airplane, for example, flew in 1932, employing technology that was later repurposed for military applications, such as the Germans’ Wasserfall (Waterfall) missile during WWII.
Several radio manufacturers supplied remote controls for some of their higher-end models by the late 1930s. While most of these devices were wired to the television, the Philco Mystery Control (1939) was a low-frequency radio wave transmitter that worked on batteries. As a result, the Philco Mystery Control became the first wireless remote control for a consumer gadget. It was also the first digital wireless remote control to use pulse-count modulation.
The usage of consumer-oriented remote control exploded during the next two or three decades after this discovery.
The number of consumer electronic gadgets in most households had substantially expanded by the early 2000s, as had the number of remote controls required to manage them. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, by the early 2000s, the average American home had at least four separate remote controls for a range of devices, including a cable or satellite TV receiver, VCR or digital video recorder, DVD player, TV and audio amplifier, and so on.
Several of these air conditioner remotes have to be used in order for them to operate correctly. The procedure grew progressively difficult due to the lack of established interface rules. The universal remote is a programmed device that has the operating codes for most major brands of televisions, stereo systems, DVD players, and other electronic devices.
Many smartphone manufacturers began including infrared emitters in their handsets in the early 2010s, allowing them to be used as universal remotes through built-in or downloaded software.
Even more recently, we appear to have entered the world of science fiction with voice-activated remote controls such as Alexa and SIRI. Although fundamental technology has existed since the 1950s, it has only recently begun to be used by the general public as a television remote control.
Infrared (IR) light, i.e. electromagnetic waves spanning in length from the nominal red edge of the visible spectrum at roughly 700 nanometers to 1 millimeter, and frequencies from around 430 terahertz to 300 gigahertz, is still the principal technology used in household, non-vocal remote controllers today. The transmission between the remote control and the object it controls is made up of infrared light pulses that are undetectable to the naked eye but detectable by a digital camera, video camera, or phone camera.
The transmitter is often a light-emitting diode (LED) integrated inside the remote’s pointing end. The infrared light pulses generate a pattern that is specific to the button pressed by the user. The target device’s receiver identifies the signal pattern of pulses, causing the device to react accordingly.
