BOISE, ID — Who will sing the praises of the man whose invention changed the lives of millions? Who will honor the impact that his modern convenience had upon the world of entertainment, the increase in snack food consumption, the decrease in physical exercise, and the battle to control what is seen and unseen? Who will bow their head in silence for a moment to acknowledge the passing of Robert Adler, co-inventor of the television remote control?During his youth, Adler and co-engineer Eugene Polley earned an Emmy Award for their handheld convenience — and the eternal scorn of television haters. Zenith Electronics Corp. reported that the man the company owes so much of its success to passed away at a Boise nursing home from heart failure at the venerable age of 93.
Adler worked for Zenith for six decades, racking up more than 180 U.S. patents, including the 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which did not actually control space, but did make it possible to sit on one’s butt while flipping through the then limited channel selection.
A 2004 interview with The Associated Press showed Alder to be a modest man, who worked with 24 other engineers to create a way for viewers to remain seated while searching for their programming preference. Although some felt that he and his fellow engineers should feel guilt about the results of their creation, Adler told the AP that the idea was “ridiculous,” explaining that he felt it was “reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”
In addition to his work on the Space Command, Adler also brought ultrasonics to the world in 1956, in order to improve the efficiency of Polley’s year old Flashmatic wireless remote. His work with surface acoustic waves in color televisions and touch screens is considered of great importance to the developing technologies, which have also been used in cell phones.
On February 1st of this year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published the last patent application accepted during his lifetime; one related to touch screen technology.
According to Polley, Adler “was part of a project that changed the world.”
Ironically, Adler’s widow remembers her husband having been “more of a reader” than a television watcher. “He was a man who would dream in the night and wake up and say, ‘I just solved a problem,'” Ingrid Adler recalls. “He was always thinking science.”
Although she acknowledges that “the remote control changed the life of every man,” she believes that the World War II communications equipment specialist with a PhD in physics from the University of Vienna who joined Zenith’s research division in 1941 would have preferred that people associate him with the work he did in military and space technology, much of which was instrumental to later engineers.
