Why people call the TV remote a clicker: early ones really clicked
The first popular wireless TV remote had no batteries for its signal. Pressing a button made a tiny hammer strike a metal bar, which rang at a pitch too high for people to hear, and the set listened for it. That audible click gave remotes their nickname, and the whole idea took decades of odd experiments to reach the sofa.
Remote control began with weapons and vehicles rather than entertainment. Werner von Siemens built a wired version in 1870, British engineers tried radio control in 1897, and Nikola Tesla showed off a radio prototype in New York in 1898. In 1903 the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo unveiled his Telekino in Paris, meant to steer an airship without risking a crew. Unlike earlier schemes, it could trigger many different actions over one channel, and he later used it to guide a boat from two kilometres away.
Home electronics followed. By the late 1930s some upmarket radios came with controllers, mostly on wires, but Philco's Mystery Control of 1939 was a battery-powered transmitter, the first wireless consumer remote and the first digital one. Zenith's Lazy Bones of 1950 steered a television through a cable. Eugene Polley's Flash-Matic of 1955 went wireless by shining light at photocells on the set, yet sunlight could set it off too, and it had to be aimed precisely.
Robert Adler's Zenith Space Command of 1956 solved that with sound. Each of its four bars rang at a different ultrasonic pitch, meaning channel up, channel down, mute or power. Cheaper transistor versions later replaced the bars with a vibrating crystal, though stray noises such as metal tapping glass could trigger them, dogs could hear them, and so could some people. Ultrasonic remotes lasted until 1977.
In 1970 RCA brought out an all-electronic digital remote with transistor memory, soon standard on colour sets. Then the BBC's Ceefax teletext service, launched in 1973, demanded more buttons: pages had three-digit numbers, so remotes needed a full keypad. Today most send coded pulses of infrared light, and newer ones add Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, motion sensing and voice control.
Source: Remote control
