Zenith Space Command | Fetch Gadgets

A cable that annoyed the customers

Zenith's first television remote, the Lazy Bones of 1950, hung off the set on a cable long enough to reach a chair. It switched the receiver on and off and stepped through the channels, but the wire running across the living room floor was the part owners complained about. That complaint is the reason the Space Command exists.

The first wireless answer came in 1955. Eugene Polley, an engineer who had joined Zenith in 1935 as a stock boy and worked his way into the engineering department, built the Flash-Matic: a pistol-shaped handset firing a directional beam of light at four photocells set into the corners of the television cabinet. Aiming at a cell turned the set on or off, muted the sound or stepped the channel tuner up and down. The mute button was new to televisions and was written into the advertising: it let a viewer silence a commercial while the picture stayed on the screen.

The flaw was in the receiver, not the handset. The photocells responded to full-spectrum light, so sunlight falling on the front of the cabinet, or a bright lamp, could change the channel by itself. Demand outran supply anyway, and in September 1955 Zenith issued an apology for not being able to build the Flash-Matic fast enough.

Radio was considered and rejected

The next design had to survive daylight, and the obvious fix was radio. It was dropped for two reasons. A radio signal passes through walls, so a handset in one apartment could have changed the channel on a neighbour's set. Zenith's marketing people also wanted a remote with no batteries in it, on the reasoning that a flat battery in a handset would be blamed on the television itself.

Robert Adler, the physicist who led research at Zenith, took the problem to a different part of the spectrum. High-frequency sound travels through a room but not through a wall.

Four rods and a click

The 1956 Space Command handset carried four lightweight aluminium rods of carefully chosen dimensions, each struck by a small hammer when a button was pressed, in the way a piano key strikes a string or sets a tuning fork ringing. Each rod produced a different fundamental frequency with ultrasonic harmonics, and circuits in the television interpreted the four tones as channel up, channel down, sound on and off, and power on and off.

Nothing else was in the handset: no battery, no valve, no transistor. The buttons hit metal. That mechanism made an audible click loud enough to be noticed in a quiet room, and because the noise came from the thing in the viewer's hand rather than from the set, households started calling the device a clicker. The name outlived the technology by decades.

What it cost and what it earned

The system added roughly 30 per cent to the price of a television, a gap that was imposing to buyers at first. The reception was warm enough that Zenith later claimed Space Command had lifted its television sales by 40 per cent, licensed the technology to RCA and other manufacturers, and twice won patent suits against Admiral.

The rod mechanism was superseded in the 1960s by circuits that generated the ultrasonic tones electronically, which made the handset smaller and cheaper. Ultrasonic tuning stayed in television sets for about 25 years, and by the time infrared light took over in the early 1980s, more than nine million sets had been sold by Zenith and its licensees with Adler's system inside. Infrared won because it could carry more complex commands, at the price of a handset that finally needed batteries.

The colour years and the odd failure

Sound is not a clean channel. The receiver could be triggered by naturally occurring noises, and later by the deliberate trick of clinking metal against glass, and some people could hear the lower harmonics that were meant to be beyond hearing. The wand also had to be aimed in the general direction of the set, though far less precisely than the Flash-Matic's light beam.

The best-known version of the system was the Space Command 600, introduced in 1965 for colour receivers and sold until the end of the 1972 model year. It had no separate colour buttons: pressing mute threw a relay that handed the motorised tuner over to a motorised hue control, so channel up and down shifted the colour, and pressing mute again returned the buttons to tuning. Zenith kept the handset at the centre of its sets for years after that, later building a speakerphone into some System 3 televisions so that a call could be dialled from the remote.

The two engineers

Polley spent 47 years at Zenith, earned 18 US patents, and died in 2012. Adler had left Vienna in 1938 after the annexation of Austria, joined Zenith's research division in 1941, and finished his career as vice president and director of research, with more than 180 US patents and the IEEE Edison Medal of 1980. He died in 2007. In 1997 the two men shared a Technology and Engineering Emmy for the pioneering development of wireless remote control for consumer television.