Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi wireless was a phony it's the same old cry welcome back
[00:00:21] Speaker B: to 100 Years of Television.
This is episode number 46, Countdown 61. Is the couch potato there for 100 weeks that started in October of 2025.
This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, that good decent boy Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and today, television goes channel surfing.
As we have worked our way through the evolution of television and its impact on the world, we have talked mostly about the technology and the earliest forms of programming.
Today we're going to talk about the actual viewing experience to set the Stage in the US in the mid-1950s, there were somewhere between 35 and 50 million television sets in American homes, representing between 75 and 80% of total households.
In Britain, where regular programming had been introduced several years before the United States, some 6 million sets represented less than 40% of total households.
Service expanded slowly beyond London after World War II, just reaching the Midlands in February of 1956 and northern England in May of that year.
A large portion of the UK still had no television at all.
Screen sizes varied from 7 inches measured diagonally to 21 inches, and in the US fewer than 25,000 of those roughly 40 million televisions were in color, which had been introduced just two years earlier.
That $1,000 price tag for a 19 inch color set still represented nearly a whole year's salary for the average worker, leaving color mostly a curiosity in department store windows. The typical television of the mid-1950s was equipped with a dial that could only tune into 12 channels, and too often even that was easier said than done.
You do have to be of a certain age to remember rooftop antennas or all the hacks owners use to improve TV reception. Like tin foil wrapped around the tips of rabbit ears, early television broadcasting was notorious for interference between stations.
That meant that empty channel space had to separate the channels you could get, which typically meant only three to five channels were available in any given metropolitan area, usually the three national networks and a couple of local stations.
To further avoid interference between adjacent channels, those in between channels were relegated to other distant markets. For example, in the nation's largest market, New York City, television was broadcast on channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13.
Channels 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12 were assigned to stations in Philadelphia.
If your father was clever enough to pick up a Philadelphia station in New York, then he was probably an electrical engineer with a degree from MIT.
During the mid-1950s, television service spread slowly around the rest of the world.
For those countries that did have the new medium, the content covered the now familiar spectrum of sitcoms, variety shows, quiz shows, westerns, police and crime dramas, children's and family programming, and news and current affairs.
But wherever in the world televisions could be found, regardless of nationality or content, the viewing experience had one thing in common.
The television sat on one side of the room and was watched from a couch or a chair on the other side of the room.
That meant that if you wanted to change the channel, somebody had to get out of their seat, cross the room and twist a knob. Then you futzed with the antenna to get a decent picture. And if the sound wasn't loud enough when you got back to your seat, well, up you go again.
Not much changed until the fall of 1956 when Zenith introduced the first invention that truly altered the viewing experience.
The Space Command. The first practical TV remote control.
The Zenith Corporation, like rca, traced its roots to the dawn of radio.
The company was started as the Chicago radio labs in 1918 by two radio enthusiasts, Ralph Matthews and Carl Hassell, who built their first products on a kitchen table.
Hassell operated an amateur station with A call sign 9ZN.
A now unknown employee playfully added if the letters I T H to the call sign, giving the fledgling company its first brand name, Zenith.
In 1921, Matthews and Hassell teamed up with Eugene McDonald, a flamboyant, self made millionaire and navy veteran who was known as the commander.
McDonald's flair for innovation and his energetic style eventually found their way into the company's products and advertising.
With Commander McDonald at the helm, Zenith grew into one of America's leading manufacturers of consumer electronics like portable radios, FM stereo systems and early color TVs. When the company took the plunge into television, it staked its reputation on a quest for for convenience as well as performance, which led Zenith to develop the first TV remotes.
The Space Command was not the company's first attempt to offer a remote control.
As early as 1950 Zenith offered the lazy Bones remote, a wired device that let users turn the TV on and off and change the channels.
While innovative for its time zone, the Lazy Bones was tied to an electrical cord, both unsightly and potentially hazardous between the controller and the TV.
In 1955, Zenith tried again with the Flashmatic, which used a beam of light aimed at photocells on the tv. But that design didn't work well in bright rooms and could be confused by sunlight.
In June of 1956, Zenith's assistant director of research, Dr. Robert AG, filed a patent for a remote control that used ultrasonic sound waves mechanically generated signals rather than wired or optical signals to transmit commands.
Once it was offered to the public as part of Zenith's premium line of new TVs in the fall of 1956, the ultrasonic space Command quickly became the first widely used wireless TV remote control.
The space command allowed viewers to change channels and adjust the volume with a satisfying metallic click from the aluminum rods inside the handheld unit. A sound so iconic that the early remotes became known as clickers.
Adler's elegant design was quickly integrated into high end Zenith models, paving the way for a new fixture in American homes.
By the early 1980s, the industry shifted from ultrasonic remotes to infrared, which enabled whole new levels of control, convenience and affordability.
With the proliferation of home entertainment systems, using infrared remotes became ubiquitous to the point that every American household had a junk drawer full of them.
Once the remote moved from novelty to standard feature, the culture of television viewing shifted in profound ways.
Viewers could change channels, change the volume and turn the power on and off without leaving the couch. And as one commercial noted, without any irony, the remote could shut off the sound of loud, annoying TV commercials.
This new level of convenience naturally lent itself to satire, which eventually became part of the vernacular.
On July 15, 1976, California counterculture humorist Tom Iacino called his friend the cartoonist Robert Armstrong.
Iacino and Armstrong were part of a humor club called the Boobtubers, whose mission was to sit on a couch, watch TV and eat junk food.
So when Armstrong's girlfriend answered the phone, Iacino said, hey, is the couch potato there?
She looked at Armstrong sitting on the couch and started laughing.
But when the laughing stopped, Iacino and Armstrong collaborated to turn the idea into a lumpy potato on a sofa. With the Potato Press, an underground comic book.
With the comics and merchandise, they made couch Potatoes. A tongue in cheek social club that celebrated watching TV as its own peculiar art form.
The television remote has come a long way since Zenith lazybones Flashmatic, and Space Command with the proliferation of new technologies like WI Fi and Bluetooth. By the 21st century, the average home had upwards of a half dozen remote controls.
Today's smart TV ecosystems allow voice control, motion control, and integration with home automation systems like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's HomeKit. The television remote introduced a profound shift in how viewers interact with the screen.
Like Winky Dink in 1953, the introduction of the Zenith Space Command in 1956 foreshadowed the ultimate direction that television would take and the role that video would come to play in modern life.
Not just a passive sit back and watch experience, but but a fully interactive environment that would eventually integrate into almost every aspect of modern life.
This brings us to the end of number 61 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when video finally goes to tape.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year weekly countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027. For more info, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Faro Vision?
[00:12:47] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how, but how.
