原创 Honoring the inventor of the TV remote control

Several days ago, Eugene Polley (1915 – 2012) passed away. An engineer and engineering manager for Zenith Electronics, Eugene was most widely known for inventing the first wireless remote control for television.

These days, younger folks take things like remote controls for granted, but it's not all that long ago that the entire idea seemed revolutionary.

For example, when I was a kid of about six years old (circa 1963), my grandfather had a stroke, so he came to live with us. We only had a small house, so we turned the dining room into a bedroom for him.

The stroke left granddad completely paralyzed down one side, which resulted in him spending most of his time in bed. This explains why we got the second TV in our house (black and white, of course), because this gave granddad something to do.

On the front of the television were four push-buttons, which you used to swap channels. Actually, we had only three channels in those days, so the fourth button was a spare, I guess.

We didn't have a remote control. I don't think my parents had even heard about such a thing. Instead, my dad purchased a wooden broom pole, which granddad used to push the buttons on the TV from the comfort of his bed.

It's strange to think that this pretty much counted as state-of-the-art for those days. The thing is that I remember granddad being "as happy as a clam" because he could change the channel himself whenever he wished—he no longer had to request someone to do it for him, so this humble broom pole was empowering in its own way.

I wonder what granddad would have thought about today's high-definition color televisions with their hundreds of channels. I also wonder what granddad would have thought about modern remote controls, which are jam-packed with buttons and functions.

Last but not least, I wonder what Eugene Polley would have thought about The Clicker, which is an all-in-one uber-gadget that fuses the remote control with the ever-important bottle cap opener in one sleek device.

Described as being "Engineered to withstand the manliest of man caves and case after case of openings," The Clicker is programmed with over 800 factory pre-sets and works with almost all major cable and satellite dish boxes.

The Clicker supports twin view and Picture-in-Picture functions for multiple game watching, and can be universally programmed for up to eight components, including your TV, DVD player, Cable box, DVR, Satellite, CD and AMP.

Hmmm, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this (grin).