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12 - Orono Weekly Times 1937 - 2012 · Celebrating 75 Years Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 Basic Black by Arthur Black The father of the couch potato How long have we had TV remotes to play with? Ten years, you figure? Twenty, maybe? You're `way off. TV browsers were around before most of the people reading this column were born. Before man walked on the moon. Before the Toronto Maple Leafs won their last Stanley Cup, even. We're talking Mesozoic here. The TV remote has been around since 1955 when a Chicago inventor named Eugene Polley invented it. Polley's prototype wasn't exactly the sleek plastic pellet with eleven dozen buttons that we're used to losing in the couch pillows nowadays. His invention looked like a ray gun from Sci Fi special effects. It had a pistol-grip handle and a trigger and it was called the Zenith FlashMatic. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job. Well...sort of. Polley's ray gun worked a bit like a flashlight. The viewer pointed it at one of the four corners of the TV screen and pulled the trigger. The top left-hand corner of the screen contained a photo cell that would turn the TV on and off. You aimed at the top right hand corner if you wanted to go to the next channel; the bottom left-hand corner if you wanted to go back to a previous channel; and the bottom right hand corner if you wanted to mute out what Polley called "those noisy TV commercials". Or perhaps I've mixed up the corners. A lot of viewers did, which was one big complaint about the Flash-Matic. Another was the fact that the TV photo cells frequently reacted with ordinary sunlight to change channels, go on and off, or mess with the volume, all on their own. It wasn't perfect, but it was revolutionary. Eugene Polley modestly suggested his invention was "the most important invention since the wheel". Well, hardly ­ but it was a major influence on television productions and the way we watch the box. Before Polley's FlashMatic, viewers who wanted to adjust the volume or change the channel were forced to put their feet on the floor, levitate to a vertical position, walk across the room and interact with the TV manually. Humans, being the lethargic creatures we are, often elected to put up with whatever drivel was emanating from the screen, rather than, you know, actually get off our lard butts and move. The result was some astonishingly mediocre television fare (anyone remember the Arthur Godfrey show?) Eugene Polley's Flash-Matic changed that. It allowed viewers to be discriminating AND lazy. We swiftly developed into a species with the attention span of a fruit fly. Horatio flapping his gums on CSI Miami? Zap it in favour of the Nature Channel. Oops, a `pollution special' ­ boring! ZAP! Check ESPN. Uh-oh ­ Jeep commercial. ZAP. The Flash-Matic is no longer with us, but its heirs and successors are. Back in its day Flash-Matic had to contend with no more than 12 channels, maximum. Today's browsers navigate a universe of hundreds of channels, not to mention computer games, the Internet and our personal music library. No need to get off the couch at all, really. We hardly need our legs anymore. Perhaps over the next millennia or two our DNA will morph and mutate so that those massive, now useless thigh and calf muscles get diverted to where they'd really be of use ­ in our thumbs. Eugene Polley won't be there to see it. He died last month at the age of 96, still convinced that he'd made a seminal contribution to human civilization. "The flush toilet might be the most civilized invention ever devised," he told a reporter, "but the remote control is the next most important." Um, actually Eugene, there are those among us who wouldn't have minded if that first remote control had been accidentally flushed down the toilet. 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