In a comment to his revelation about the power of Slinkys to change TV channels, Cecil noted the effect of twanging a chopstick held in his teeth caused the TV picture to turn into “a jiggling sheet of Jell-O.”
He said he’d leave to the grad students to figure out the precise mechanism.
Not a precise mechanism, but a related phenomenon, can be illustrated by your hand in front of your face. If you wag it side to side really quickly, your fingers will be all blurry. However, if you hold your hand still but instead rotate your head left and right really fast, your eyes can lock on your hand and your fingers won’t blur. Evidently, there’s some evolutionary feedback that allows your eyes to lock on an object even when your head moves rapidly, faster than your eyes can follow while your head is still.
It is not necessary to use any apparatus to see the TV image apparently wobble. Just stick out your lips, (not tongue), and blow through making a blurting sound. Varying the vibrations produced causes interesting variations in apparent screen image wobble.
I had a supervisor relate a similar experience once. We were discussing which one of us was geekier and he told me about the time he discovered how to make the crt screen vibrate. He’d been playing with a leftover carboard tube from the plotter and blew through it like a trumpet while looking at the screen. Lo and behold, it made the screen shake! He then tried to get all his coworkers to watch him do this awesome trick, but even when a few watched, they saw nothing as he huffed and puffed and blew his credibility out the tube. It wasn’t until much later that he realized that it was his glasses vibrating and not the screen.
When I was a kid, my friend’s family had one of those types of remotes. You could semi-reliably change channels by dropping a metal chain dog leash on a glass coffee table.
The remotes would make an audible sound which is why TV remotes are still sometimes called “clickers.”
My dad had a remote for our TV when I was a kid - it was me.
Although, when I was a small child, we got only one channel, so that reduced the need for my efforts. I think I was around ten when we moved to a larger town (or, somewhat closer to the town with the TV stations) and actually got three channels.
When I was a wee lad, there was a TV in the house that had a remote. The remote was as big as <fumbles for references…> about as big as three iPods stacked up and it had only three large buttons. One was VHF channel change and power, and the other two were volume up/down. You’d turn it off by “tuning” it to what would be channel 14 - just the space on the dial between channel U and 2.
Huh? Channel U? If you wanted a UHF channel, you’d turn the dial to U, then dial in the channel on the UHF tuner by hand - this set had no remote way to change the UHF.
The remote was almost pointless as you’d almost always have to nudge the fine tuning every time you changed channels. :smack:
But the noise it made as the mechanism hit the ultrasonic rods was more of a clack than a click, so it really should have been called the clacker.
On the good TV in the family room, you didn’t need to mess with fine tuning too often, but the remote on it was telling the nearest kid to change the channel.
The first remote my parents had was pneumatic. A long plastic tube plugged into the set, and the other end had a squeeze bulb the size of a lemon. One squeeze would bump the channel selector up one channel (the knob on the TV turned when it changed.) It would only go up, and when it went past 13, it turned the set off. There were stations on 4,6,8, and 13. The UHF stations were too weak and too far away for us to get.
SWMBO’s family had one of those, as did mine when we were growing up. The sound it made wasn’t just a click, it was a click followed by a twang, which led to us referring to the as PooKahs. And to the day, we still call the remote a pookah, which tends to draw strange looks from others when they hear the term for the first time.
