TV remote control history: How a luxury gadget from 1950 became a living room essential

The TV remote control took roughly 30 years to go from curious luxury to household staple — and for most of that time, it was far weirder than the plastic rectangles we know today.

The idea goes back to 1950, when Zenith introduced its first remote, a wired device called the Lazy Bones. It let viewers change channels from their seats, which was the point, but it connected to the TV by a long cable snaking across the floor — a reliable way to trip and sprain an ankle!

The wireless breakthrough came in 1955, when Zenith engineer Eugene Polley developed the Flash-Matic, which used a flashlight-style beam aimed at photo cells in the corners of the screen. The concept worked, mostly. The problem was that the TV couldn’t tell Polley’s beam from sunlight or a stray lamp, which meant channels could flip on their own whenever conditions were bright enough.

Robert Adler, another Zenith engineer, solved it a year later with a completely different approach. His 1956 Space Command remote had no batteries, no electronics and no light. Instead, it contained small aluminum rods that, when struck by tiny hammers inside the unit, produced ultrasonic tones — frequencies high enough that the TV’s receiver could hear them but humans generally couldn’t.

The whole thing weighed 8 ounces and fit in the palm of your hand. Adding the Space Command system to a Zenith set required six extra vacuum tubes in the television and pushed the retail price up by roughly 30 percent, which kept it firmly in premium territory for years. Still, the technology worked well enough that it became an industry standard, and more than nine million ultrasonic remote control TVs were sold before infrared technology arrived in the 1980s.

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, manufacturers refined the ultrasonic design. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, which allowed for battery-powered handsets and dropped the cost. Danish firm Bang & Olufsen introduced remotes with haptic cues on the buttons — concave for down, convex for up — so users could operate them in the dark without fumbling. But the remote stayed a premium feature through most of this period. As late as 1979, only about 17 percent of American households had one.

VIDEO  |  1961 RCA Victor color TV with wireless remote

It was the arrival of cable and satellite TV in the 1970s and 1980s that finally made the remote genuinely useful for a mass audience. Suddenly there were dozens of channels to cycle through instead of three or four, and getting up to do it every time was a real inconvenience.

Infrared technology, which used invisible light pulses instead of sound, took over the market by around 1983 — cheaper to produce, more reliable and less prone to interference from ambient noise. VCRs arrived around the same time and brought their own remotes, as did cable boxes and stereo systems.

By the mid-1980s, a typical household might have separate controllers for the TV, cable converter, VCR and a disc player, all of which looked roughly the same and did completely different things. That pile-up pushed the development of the universal remote, with Philips releasing the first commercially successful version in 1985.

Steve Wozniak, who left Apple in the mid-1980s specifically to tackle the problem, introduced a fully programmable universal remote called the CL 9 CORE in 1987. Early versions cost around $150 and required patience to set up; eventually they came preprogrammed and dropped to single-digit prices.

Adler and Polley were jointly awarded an Emmy in 1997 by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for their pioneering work on wireless remote controls — a fitting recognition for two engineers whose invention reshaped how Americans spent their evenings. Here, we’ve collected vintage Zenith Space Command ads and photos from the 1950s and 1960s, back when the remote was still a selling point novel enough to put in the headline.