It was ultrasonic, so music or speech wouldn’t affect it, but as mentioned above, dropping keys or clinking a glass could cause the channel to change.
Or, if you were a kid who loved to mimic voices and discovered you could hit the specific pitch of certain noises…
But I only used my channel-changing powers for good (like, when my sister was watching Petticoat Junction).
Hey, digs, are you the one I confessed my McDonald’s misadventures to? I would sit at a table and whistle the exact note of the fry machine right after the worker emptied the basket. Said worker would turn around and punch the “off” button again. And again. And again, until it stopped being funny. I’m a bad burpo.
Monty Python demonstrated such an early remote, though while lacking a battery it was connected to the mains.
We saw many of those in the TV repair shop where I grew up. As noted above, other noises with high-pitched harmonics, like keys or coins jingling, could also trigger them. And when you had several of the TVs on the workbenches, anyone using the remote made all of them change. We had various things on the benches we’d hit to change channels on them when the remote was missing or out of reach.
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A friend of mine had a similar TV remote in the late '70s. Upon entering his apartment he would toss his keys onto the coffee table to turn on the TV.
Never had one myself, and IIRC my first TV remote was a non-clicking one in the late '80s. For some reason I always called(and still do call) the TV remote ‘the clicker’.
Of course at least half of the time I refer to where I keep milk as the ‘icebox’.
Yes, ICEBOX! We should mosey on over to the “old-person-isms” thread and demand an audience.
Same here. Our neighbors had one. We had an old black and white TV and I was the “remote”. I think we were the last house on our block to get a color TV. By the time we got a TV with a remote, “clickers” were long since obsolete and everyone was using IR.
When I was about ten, so ca. 1978, my grandparents had a TV with a remote that didn’t produce sounds mechanically nor was it IR, but what I now assume to be an electronic sound generator that worked predominantly in the infrasound spectrum, so that every button produced a different high frequency sound. But I remember that at that age, I still could hear some of these sounds, depending on which button was pressed. Of course my grandparents couldn’t hear those high pitches anymore. Does anybody remember those remotes? (this was in Germany, so maybe it was a special technology done only by a German company)
This is the first I’ve heard of that technology. However, there’s an episode of Modern Family in which Ed O’Neil’s character Jay calls a TV remote a clicker. I thought it odd and forgot about it, but something clicked (heh) when I saw the title of this thread. The Modern Family writers often relied on old-person-isms, and not only from the Jay character.
“Infrasound” is the term for frequencies lower than normal humans can hear; more the sort of vibrations you can feel with your whole body. “Ultrasonic” is the term for frequencies above the high-frequency limit of normal human hearing.
As you say, most little kids can hear higher freqs than most adults. Which implies the exact definition of “ultrasonic” is partly audience-dependent. I was sure bothered by ultrasonic alarm noises in department stores as a kid.
As to sonic remotes, I recall the mechanical audible “clicker” type, and the next one we got was fully electronic, but came with a 10 or 15 foot cord to plug into the front of the TV. So you could enjoy controlling the TV from the couch until somebody tripped over the cord & damaged it.
I personally never encountered an ultrasonic remote, but my personal sample size is tiny. You’re almost certainly on the right track.
Ooooh 
, I know that, I’m an electrical engineer. It was a brainfart.
I always have to think twice about infrared and ultraviolet then think of a prism before I’m sure which way to say that too. 
The allegedly ultrasonic remotes were still in use when I worked in (another) TV shop in college, and they drove me up the wall. I could hear about half the signals from them, and they were like a mix of nails-on-chalkboard and a mosquito buzzing right in my ear. Not super-loud, but extremely annoying. I was very glad when they were abandoned for infrared remotes.
Speaking of Infra-sound, anyone remember “Sensurround,” the ultra-low frequencies they tacked onto certain movie soundtracks? Midway and Earthquake come to mind (there were a few others). As badly as I wanted it to work, it never did for me. Do you think that was due to my crummy hearing or maybe the movie houses of my youth didn’t have the sound systems to handle it?
Sensurround was real effective. You felt it more than heard it. If that didn’t happen for you I’d bet it was a crappy theater. It took expensive dedicated equipment to play it back properly.
There was another system that was pretty effective - each seat had it’s own “mass driver” that shook the seats during earthquakes or explosions. But, it was obviously expensive to install, and wasn’t widely accepted, although they are still popular in Home Theatre.
Not possible. NCSC has 25 kHz of audio bandwidth at most, and in practice it was significantly less (fine, since humans don’t hear much beyond 16 kHz). The clicker devices operated at ~40 kHz.
Hey, I found a clip of the bit from The Apartment showing the remote that Lemmon was using. It wasn’t any kind of wireless signaling device at all. It was something hooked up by wires to the TV set.