THE TV REMOTE CONTROL WAS AN INVENTION BORN not of necessity or even convenience. It grew out of one man’s detestation of advertising. Eugene McDonald, the founder of the Zenith Corporation, declared in 1946 that advertiser-supported television could never succeed. Citing the high cost of producing programming, he insisted that television, unlike radio, could not possibly earn a profit on ad revenue alone. The solution: subscription television.

When advertiser-supported TY failed to die of natural causes, he tried to kill it, and his weapon was the remote control. His hope was that the viewing public would use the remote to obliterate annoying commercials by changing channels or muting the sound. This would eventually force advertisers to abandon the medium, clearing the way for his pay-TV concept.

In 1950 Zenith introduced the first remote control, the Lazy Bones. Users of it and its rivals that soon followed didn’t have to worry about misplacing the thing; it was firmly attached to the television set by a long cord. Pressing its buttons operated a motor inside the television chassis that rotated the channel tuner.

These wired remotes never really caught on. They were expensive—about $50 (roughly $350 in today’s money) plus the cost of a technician to install the equipment—and the cords were a nuisance. Similar devices for radios had earlier failed for the same reasons. Also, though it was the golden age of television, there wasn’t a lot of programming to choose from. Channel surfing wasn’t much of an option.

Undaunted, in 1955 Zenith unleashed the first TV with a wireless remote, the Flash-Matic. The Flash-Matic’s remote looked like a ray gun. It was basically a flashlight that you aimed at photoelectric cells located at each corner of the screen. Depending on which corner you shot at, the remote could change the channel forward and back and turn the sound and power on and off. Zenith sold about 30,000 of them, but customers complained that sunlight and ill-placed lamps caused the sets to change channels unbidden.

McDonald wanted something better. Radio control looked promising; it was already used for model airplanes and garage-door openers. But as a former Zenith physicist named Robert Adler remarked in 1986, “Radio waves worked fine, except they also worked fine for your neighbor.”

Adler suggested using ultrasonics, high-frequency sound waves inaudible to the human ear. Ultrasonic waves of different frequencies could control different functions. Zenith’s sales force, however, insisted on a cordless remote that didn’t need batteries. They thought a dead battery might make a customer think the remote or even the TV itself had broken, so Adler and a team of engineers developed an ingenious solution, a mechanical ultrasonic transmitter. It had four aluminum rods of different lengths; pressing a button caused a spring-loaded hammer to strike one of the rods, and it would vibrate like a tuning fork to produce the sound waves, which a microphone on the TV picked up.

Watching a prototype demonstration, McDonald exclaimed, “We gotta have it! We gotta have it!” According to Adler, “All hell broke loose.” Adler’s team scrambled to bring the new device, called Space Command, onto the market in 1956. By 1959 most of the major television manufacturers were offering sets with ultrasonic remotes. In the 1960s, manufacturers, including Zenith, introduced batteryoperated remote controls that generated the sound signals electronically, and people seemed perfectly able to cope with them.

Ultrasonics remained the standard for a quarter of a century, but the remotes stayed a luxury item used with topof-the-line televisions. Only about 10 million were sold between 1956 and the early 1980s, when the next generation of remotes appeared.

It was ironically the belated arrival of pay TV in the 1970s and 1980s, in the form of cable and satellite services, that finally made the remote control a truly useful convenience for surfins the countless new channels suddenly available. The new breed of inexpensive and increasingly ubiquitous remotes used infrared signals generated by light-emitting diodes. Invented in the early 1960s, LEDs had found use in alphanumeric displays for watches, calculators, and other devices. They boasted several advantages over their ultrasonic counterparts. The earlier ones used a different frequency for each function, so adding functions meant adding costly and complex circuitry to both the remote control and the receiver. And TVs sometimes picked up stray ultrasonic waves generated by jangling keys or loose coins.

Infrared remotes worked simply by shooting a kind of rapid-fire Morse code at the television. LEDs and the microchips that controlled them were cheap and getting cheaper, so by 1983 infrared remotes had completely replaced the ultrasonics. The VCR and the cable converter box were emerging by then, and they came with their own remotes, as did stereo systems.

With remotes multiplying like rabbits in people’s homes, the “universal remote” rode to the rescue in the mid-1980s. The first of them cost about $150 and were tedious and timeconsuming to program. Before long, they were offered preprogrammed with control codes for numerous makes of TVs, VCRs, and cable converters. Today’s universal remotes cost as little as $10 and let their owners lord over a roomful of consumer electronics.

McDonald died in 1958, his dream unrealized. With his disdain for TV ads, he might have felt, had he lived to today, that the best part of his invention was the off button.