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How many times has this happened to you?
You`ve stumbled home from work, donned your ”Born to Recline” T-shirt and settled into the La-Z-Boy, primed for a prosaic night in front of the television.
All of a sudden, your spouse comes barging into the room, and, without even asking, starts firing away: Zap. Zap. Zap, Zap, Zap. As the images fly by, you realize your brain is beginning to hurt. What started as a simple episode of ”Magnum, P.I.” has been transformed into something out of a student film festival. Video hell.
Welcome to the 1980s, bucko.
Thanks to a gadget the size of a swollen Hershey bar, and covered with enough buttons to make a laboratory chimp skip breakfast, television has come to demand that viewers have a mental agility previously required only of astronauts, air traffic controllers and indicted public officials.
Though the device is known, in the general nomenclature, as ”remote control” or, more familiarly, ”the zapper,” those terms don`t begin to describe its omnipotence. Under its spell last year, for instance, one group of couch potatoes-cum-college students dubbed the gadget ”God.”
When Robert Adler, now 72, invented the first practical wireless remote 30 years ago in a Zenith Radio Corp. lab, he was more concerned with satisfying a demanding boss, and with disproving his coworkers` insistence that his idea wouldn`t work, than with any sort of long-range impact the device might have.
But as this new deity of the American den celebrates its diamond anniversary, it seems to permeate more and more of society daily. God is everywhere, we are told in church. Remote control is getting there.
Some numbers: In 1985, for the first time, more than half of the 17 million color TV sets sold in the U.S. came with wireless remote, according to the Electronic Industries Association. Where 16 percent of all television households had remote in 1981, according to Statistical Research Inc., that number, half a decade later, is 47 percent.
The impact of remote control goes beyond mere numbers. On the list of lifestyle-altering gizmos, this one is written in big, bold letters–not in the apocalyptic spray paint of the atom bomb, certainly, but not in the tentative pencil marks of the lettuce spinner, either. To wit:
— It has given every single American the power to turn Dan Rather into Fred Flintsone faster than you can say, ”In the Mideast today, yabba dabba do.”
— It has made cable, with its plethora of programming, a less formidable beast; at the same time, it has helped create a coven of cable fiends, who, for hours on end, cruise the 30-odd channels, sure that there is something, somewhere, worth watching at 3:30 on a Sunday morning.
— It has released us from the captivity of commercials, and may very well have sparked the recent upsurge in their entertainment value.
— It has pitted mother against daughter and father against son in the ritual suburban post-dinner battle over who gets to hold it, and thus the whole TV world, in his hand.
— It has transformed some living rooms into veritable button-box showcases–one for the TV, one for the cable converter, one for the VCR and, in the most avant of avant-garde households, one for the stereo. Can the remote-controlled blender be far away? Will we be able to puree at a distance? Stay tuned.
If we could zap not only programs but years, we`d see that it wasn`t always this way.
In the mid-1950s, when the implications of TV itself were just beginning to be understood, Adler was a mild-mannered Zenith technical wizard, an Austrian with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Vienna, embroiled in the intricacies of the vacuum tube.
One day, however, he was called to put aside his projects and attend a brainstorming session on how to build a better remote control device. Modern technology, such as it existed at Zenith, had come up with three options, but each was less than ideal.
The first remote, marketed by the company as ”Lazy Bones,” worked by sending signals along a wire–a wire, says Adler, that ”people stumbled over,” a wire that ”would get tangled up in the furniture.” A wire whose clumsiness outweighed its convenience.
Another version, which never made it past the drawing board at Zenith, would have beamed a radio signal to a receiver in the set–no great challenge to the technicians, but a pain in the neck to, say, neighboring apartment-dwellers who might wish to retain control over their television sets. ”Radio waves worked fine,” Adler says, ”except they also worked fine for your neighbor.”
The third, sold as ”Flash-Matic,” was the first truly wireless remote control. ”There were four photoelectric cells in each corner of the set,”
says Adler, ”and the viewer had a highly directional flashlight. The idea was to flash the light at the appropriate corner of the screen.
”It turned out that the people who bought this thing–fortunately, not too many–couldn`t remember which corner did what. So it was a continuous battle: You`d turn the set off when what you wanted to do was put it to the next channel and that sort of thing.
”In addition to that, if you had the set on an east wall and in the evening the sun set in front of your window, the tuner would start going around in circles. So altogether it was not a real success.”
But Zenith`s founder and president, Comdr. Eugene F. McDonald Jr.–known to underlings as ”the Commander”–pressed on. He was convinced, according to Adler, that, unless viewers were given a means to sidestep them, commercials would kill TV.
At the brainstorming session, the ground rules were made clear: The new unit had to be wireless, it had to fit in the consumer`s hand and it could depend on no extraneous energy source–neither battery nor electrical cord.
It was there that Adler stepped into the remote control void. ”I came up at that meeting with the idea of using high-frequency sound,” he recalls.
”In other words, sound that`s so high in frequency that nobody can hear it,” but, unlike radio waves, doesn`t penetrate walls.
”I had really not heard of the problem before, but it was a challenge. Particularly since several people at the meeting said they didn`t think this could work. That always helps.
”So after that meeting we started making some experiments. There was quite a lot of pioneering involved because there were no commercial instruments for either generating or picking up ultrasound. . . . We had to really construct our own microphones.”
Soon, Adler`s informal research team was ready to show off an early version of their system. ”We got a lot of help,” he says, ”after the executives, particularly Cmdr. McDonald, saw a demonstration of this and said: `We gotta have it. We gotta have it.` And, of course, when the boss says,
`We gotta have it,` all hell breaks loose. Everybody works nights.”
Within a year of the brainstorming session, in June, 1956, the Commander`s commercial-slayer was in production. The whole unit, which retailed for $399.95 for a black-and-white console, was christened ”Space Command TV.” (”The term `command`?” says Adler. ”I strongly suspect that it was suggested by one of the Commander`s yes men.”)
The deluxe model 400–so enumerated because Adler thought ”4”
pedestrian–featured all of four buttons: on-off, channel lower, channel higher and a mute button to, as an advertisement of the era trumpeted, ”shut off the sound of long, annoying commercials.”
A star was born. And America had been granted its inalienable right to practical fingertip control of its TV sets.
”It made a good-sized splash,” says Adler. ”Some people said they thought it was a useless gadget, but I said, `I don`t think so.` Because in principle a control that you can keep where you are, rather than where the set is, makes sense.”
Time, of course, proved Adler to be as good a prophet as he was a scientist. Time also, of course, brought changes in the original device:
Batteries were allowed, new functions were added and, in the last five years, new developments in infrared technology have rendered his sound wave-based invention obsolete.
”This is a completely different device nowadays,” he says. Instead of ultrasonic waves, modern zappers use infrared light to send their signal.
”The infrared light is coded in all kinds of digital code,” Adler says,
”and you can have as many functions as you want.”
All of which results in ”more buttons than an airplane instrument panel,” Adler says. ”We never could have done that . . . but, you know, it
(the original device) lasted 25 years, which is not bad.”
Adler is far more amused than wistful when he talks about the invention. He holds more than 150 patents, according to Zenith, an astonishing number that got him promoted to the rung of corporate vice president and director of research. In his seventh decade, he is still a full-time consultant, and still walking the cutting edge of new product development.
So he finds it funny when people remember him for a 30-year-old, now-obsolete idea. ”I have quite a few completely non-technical friends who at one time or another have heard that I was the one who invented remote control. ”And since that`s something that they know very well–because they have one, you know–they know me as `the guy who invented remote control.` They never heard of microwave tubes, they never heard of touch panels, they never heard of SAW filters (other Adler developments), which I think are much more sophisticated in many respects. But, you know . . .”
He giggles. ”That`s life.”
Life is also, as the saying goes, an imitation of art. And though television only occasionally qualifies as such, the 1980 film ”Being There” certainly makes the list. Based on the Jerzy Kosinski novel, it was seen by many as a biting commentary on the tube-happy status of America. It featured, in a cameo role, the zapper.
In the movie, Peter Sellers plays Chance, an illiterate gardener who has lived completely isolated from the outside world, save for his garden and his remote control-equipped TV set. The man he works for dies, and during his first venture into the streets, Chance encounters some young toughs.
With a confident air, he points his zapper at them, pushes a button and waits for them to turn into . . . one can only imagine: Marlin Perkins? Mary Tyler Moore? Dick Clark?
They remain, of course, young and tough. And Chance goes on to become a key adviser to the President of the United States.
Although remote control devices are not yet capable of zapping away the woes of real life, they are becoming more and more powerful.
Steve Wozniak, for example, the techno-whiz behind Apple Computers, has staked his new company on the future of remote control. Called CL 9, his Los Gatos, Calif. firm plans to introduce by the end of the year a mega-remote that reads your machines` infrared code–VCR, TV, CD player, whatever, so long as it`s infrared–and then does the job of all your old remotes, reducing zapper clutter.
”We feel that there are at least a couple of million (people) ready, willing and able to buy this product as soon as we can produce it,” says company president Sam Bernstein, who anticipates a retail price of ”under $200” for the yet-to-be-named, 7-by-2 1/2-inch, 3-ounce, 17-button unit.
The firm`s goal, he says, is to see, ”with the brainpower of the microprocessor, what can we do to make life better, more fun, more pleasant.” There are some, however, who do not see simplified technology manipulation as the key to a better life. Herb Chao Gunther, executive director of San Francisco`s Public Media Center, a public interest advertising agency that creates any number of television commercials, finds evil in the remote control boom.
He sees remote control as ”the next step in the evolution of
(television) turning people into not only mindless beings, but into beings that are totally physically incapacitated as well.” He charges that it
”gives folks a phony sense of control. It`s almost like a drug.”
Gunther`s techno-ideological opposite is another Californian, Robert Armstrong, ”head spud” of the Couch Potatoes, a society dedicated to
”prolonged television viewing” that claims 7,000 members.
”It`s a milestone development, along with the TV tray and the VCR, for prolonged viewing,” says Armstrong. ”It`s one of the great boons to mankind.”
Straddling the fence in this issue are the advertising agencies. While they fret over things like a 1985 Florida State University survey that showed that 34 percent of respondents were zapping commercials ”almost always,”
”very often” or ”usually,” they note that people have always had and used internal zappers–conversation, for instance, or a foray to the kitchen. They argue that the control remotes give viewers is not, as Chao Gunther contends, fraudulent. Ron Kaatz, a J. Walter Thompson USA senior vice president, calls remote control ”the ballot box of the viewer.”
He credits the device, along with increased viewer sophistication, with upgrading the interest level of advertising. To compete with ”that smoking gun” in the viewer`s hand, he says, ”the advertiser has gone to far more highly dramatic, highly produced commercials.”
Robert Adler, meanwhile, does not readily launch himself into the philosophical fray. But, with coaxing, he`ll offer his views:
”There are certainly some things that when you think about them, even though they may look like technical progress, are questionable from the standpoint of society. I don`t quite see that here, because it`s so specific. This thing here, the only purpose that it has is to control the program of the TV that you are watching. When you`re not watching TV, it has no function, right?
”Well, you may argue about what TV has done to our society, and I think a lot of people are not convinced that it has done only good. But, taking it for granted that some people are going to watch TV whether it`s healthy for them or not, they might as well control the TV set from where they are sitting.
”In fact, you might say, maybe occasionally they might get so tired of the commercials that they`ll turn on Channel 11.”
