Commander EF McDonald was an eccentric who had founded the Zenith Radio Company , a company that, from the 1920s to the 1960s, was one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, like a sort of Apple from a century ago.
Many of the inventions that came out of Zenith were certainly outlandish, useless, or even pseudoscientific, like a device for transferring thought through Hertian waves .
However, thanks to this desire to explore previously untouched terrain, Zenith also enlightened a seemingly nondescript device that was going to change everything: a remote control to change the TV channel.
Flash-Matic
A study by Forrester Research already showed in 2011 that 48% of Americans consume television while using a second screen . Before the arrival of the smartphone , zapping was the norm. However, a century ago, in the early days of television, changing channels meant getting out of your chair, which was a huge effort considering that there was not much supply either.
But McDonald, in the 1950s, noticed that television was beginning to be the subject of more and more advertising interruptions, and that this was beginning to arouse the ire of some people, even the most important cultural critics. Orson Welles , for example, complained about the decline that appliance was beginning to experience in 1956: “I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts, although I can’t stop eating them.”
When you were young and agile, getting up from the couch to change the chain or even turn down the volume of those smashing commercials was relatively easy, although cumbersome. However, McDonald was thinking of all those older people who had a harder time getting up every few seconds.
What McDonald then proposed to his engineers at Zenith was the conception of an ad blocker that could be used remotely , without having to leave the site.
This is how one of its inventors, Eugene Polley , introduced him to the Flash-Matic, a device vaguely reminiscent of a science fiction revolver or ray gun that fired visible light at four photoelectric cells located in each corner of the screen. The idea, on a promotional level, could not be more interesting in a time when the western was very popular: you could turn off the ads with one shot .
By unsheathing the “revolver”, then, one could suppress the sound of the advertisement and dedicate oneself to other tasks during its broadcast, for example.
Although it is true that previous remote controls already existed, these could only turn on / off the equipment and change the channels, and they were also connected to the television with a cable .
The problem with the Flash-Matic is that it was still very rudimentary. Not only did you have to aim well at the corners for it to work, but everything was controlled with a single button : on and off, channel up, channel down, and mute. Each corner had a photoelectric cell that served a single function: the lower receivers were those that served to silence and turn on / off, and the upper photoelectric cells, to change the channel forward or backward.
Also, if the sun or the light from an overly powerful light bulb hit the television’s photoelectric cells, then it could turn the volume up or down on its own. To overcome these pitfalls, Zenith would soon release an improved version: the Space Command that, instead of a beam of light, used ultrasound.
