Did anyone have this remote? The buttons struck an aluminium rod in the device which produced an ultrasonic sound that communicated with the television. No batteries required - ingenious!
Yeah, I remember those remotes. I had a TV that used one into the 1990s. Those buttons were satisfying to press. I took the remote apart to see how it worked. I thought it was pretty clever. What I don’t know is how the TV recieved the signal.
There were four rods in the remote, one for each button. Each rod was a different length which made them produce a different tone when struck. It would have been funny to make a wind chime out of those rods and watch the TV look like it was possessed.
According to Cecil, you could sometimes get the same results dropping a handful of pennies on the floor or jingling your car keys.
I didn’t naive one, but my mom bought a tv for my Grandmother and it had one of those remotes.
Brian
I think you can see one (or its ancestor) in use in the movie The Apartment, from 1960. Jack Lemmon is watching TV and using a remote, long before I thought they existed. It’s in a scene near the beginning of the movie.
Neighbor had one. I was the remote at our place.
IIRC, the channels changed in only one direction, so you had to go around to get from 4 to 2. But there were only 13 channels anyway. Taking a closer look at the photo, it looks as though it did go both directions.
My grandparents had one.
They also rigged up a “mute” switch. It was an on/off switch connected to the speaker wires. It ran across the room so you could turn off the speakers whenever you wanted. A few years later, I saw a MAD magazine article that showed how to do it.
Had one. I still call the remote the clicker.
Our household TV had that. And I grew up not hearing advertisements anywhere near as often as other kids.
My dad got a VCR pretty early, about 1981-2. It came with a wired remote, no batteries in that one, either.
Yeah, the complaint was the channel selector was also triggered by car keys jingling. Another variant, was the Zenith “Space Command”, nothing more really than a glorified flashlight. It sometimes required placing the television in a less than ideal spot because the optical sensor was sensitive to sunlight.
We had a Betamax with a wired remote. I think “Pause” was the only button. That was handy if you were recording something you were watching so you could manually zap the commercials.
We had one, I think it was pretty early on in the 60s. My father thought that the definition of luxury was not being required to get up out of his chair to do anything trivial like changing channels. As it happened, before we got the remote, we kids were his remote. The four buttons were for channel up, channel down, sound up and sound down. He would crank the sound down for commercials, before we had one with a mute button.
My aunt had one of those. Her parrot figured out how to imitate it, and could cause havoc with the TV occasionally.
My friend’s family had one in the early 80s, maybe late 70s. Like others have mentioned, you could drop the metal dog leash on the glass coffee table to get the tv to change. The design is true genius.
As a kid I had a very basic remote control car that used a wireless “clicker”. The “click” would toggle between driving straight or turning right.
In addition to the tuning fork type, there were also remotes with ultrasonic whistles.
The latter definitely worked on our TV.
As a pre-teen in the early 80s I can tell you that was not the only purpose of the pause button.
Did the TV ever accidentally change its own channel, by playing a broadcast sound that mimicked the clicker?