A convenience before it was a habit
Adjusting a television once meant getting up. The earliest sets had knobs on the front for the channel selector, volume and contrast, and many had separate controls for fine-tuning the picture. As broadcast schedules grew in the 1940s and 1950s, so did the temptation to change channels without leaving the chair. The remote control is a good example of a convenience that looks small but changes behavior.
Early ideas
Remote control as a concept was older than television. Radio control had been demonstrated before the First World War, and Nikola Tesla gave public demonstrations of a radio-controlled boat in 1898. Garage-door openers and other radio-controlled devices were developed in the following decades.
The first remote controls designed for commercial television came from American manufacturers in the early 1950s. Several firms tried different approaches, and the Zenith Radio Corporation became the best known. Its founder, Eugene McDonald, is said to have wanted a way to avoid hearing commercials, though the story is more of a company legend than a verified fact, so it is best treated with caution.
Four early designs
- Lazy Bones (about 1950): A wired remote that controlled a motor in the set. The cable made it dependable, but it was a trip hazard.
- Flash-Matic (1955): Introduced by Zenith, this device was developed by Eugene Polley. It beamed visible light at photocells in the set. It was cordless but sensitive to other light sources.
- Space Command (1956): Developed by Zenith engineer Robert Adler, it used ultrasonic sound produced by striking tuned aluminum rods. Because it needed no batteries, it was cheap to maintain and appealed to makers.
- Transistorized ultrasonic remotes (1960s): Battery-powered units replaced the rods with electronic circuits and were smaller.
Polley and Adler both received credit from Zenith, and both are named in industry histories. Adler continued to work on ultrasonic remote control for years, and a long-standing joint credit is the usual way the pair is described.
Cost and spread
Early remotes were an extra-cost feature, and they were found mainly on expensive sets. The early Flash-Matic and Space Command models added a noticeable amount to the price of a television, and plain sets without remotes remained the norm. Many households operated a television without a remote well into the 1970s. Remote controls were gradually included in more models, particularly after the introduction of cable and the growth in the number of channels.
Another change was that early sets had a rotary tuner that clicked from one channel to the next. A remote needed a motor to turn it, which is why small electric motors were needed in early designs, and why electronic tuning, with no moving parts, made remotes cheaper and more responsive. The change to electronic tuners in the 1970s and 1980s worked together with the move to infrared handsets.
Infrared and many buttons
Infrared handsets became standard in the 1980s. They also changed the design of television sets. A remote that could select any channel by number, adjust volume smoothly and mute sound turned the set into something operated entirely from the couch. Manufacturers added on-screen displays so that functions could be seen on the screen, and menus replaced many front-panel controls. Later, similar handsets controlled video recorders, cable boxes and game consoles, and universal remotes combined these in a single device.
The effect on viewing
The remote did not simply save steps. It lowered the cost of changing one’s mind. With a remote, switching away from an advertisement or an uninteresting segment took a second, and viewers began to browse several channels at once. Broadcasters and advertisers responded by changing how programs and ads were scheduled and structured. Channel surfing is the best-known example. Critics and researchers have disagreed about how large the effects were, and that cable expansion and the video recorder were changing viewing at the same time.
Remotes also moved into other areas of life. Garage doors, car locks, air conditioners and stereo systems adopted the idea, and today smartphones running an app, or a smart speaker, can serve as the remote. The little handset on the arm of the sofa began as a luxury add-on and became a standard part of the home. In the 2020s, voice assistants and home automation are the next stage in the same trajectory of convenient control.