Friday, February 16, 2007

The passing of a great man

From the newswire tonight:

Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the T-V remote has died. Robert Adler was 93. Adler and fellow engineer Eugene Polley won an Emmy for the device that made couch potatoship possible. In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U-S patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make T-V a truly sedentary pastime. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Adler and co-inventor Polley -- another Zenith engineer -- won an Emmy in 1997 for the landmark invention. He died of heart failure in a Boise, Idaho nursing home.

6 comments:

Ma Horton said...

My Dad brought home our very first black and white television set in the early 60's .. We thought we were beyond rich and from that moment one Ed Sullivan and Little Joe and Hoss were our Sunday night company . Never forgot it

Bob said...

My grandparents had one of the first B&W TV's in Ansonville (now Iroquois Falls) in 1956 -- two years before I was born, and then one of the first colour TV's in 1966. We used to go to their house on Saturdays to watch cartoons (Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles) and then the hockey game.

A man who owned a TV shop on Main St. in Ansonville is now shovelling coal in Hell with Saddam Hussein. A bunch of kids from our neighbourhood walked the three blocks to his store one Tuesday night to watch Red Skelton in colour, through his front window. When he saw us, he turned off the outdoor speaker and screwed around with the TV controls to make everything green and purple. Keep shovelling, you S.O.B.

Ma Horton said...

Sheesh , did we wake up on the wrong side of the nail bed this morning ...

Anonymous said...

Worst part of the story is that his body went missing for about a day... but after a thorough it turned up between two couch cusions along with some salt and vinigar chips.

Boo hiss... I know, I know. Don't car....
M

Anonymous said...

Eeesh! Missing words, spelling mistakes... what a mess my last post was.

No more posting with 20 seconds left on a song.

Here's a corrected version:

Worst part of the story is that his body went missing for about a day... but after a thorough search it turned up between two couch cusions along with some salt and vinigar chips.

Boo hiss... I know, I know. Don't care....

Ma Horton said...

Crap , after reading that twice , I felt like I was in that movie Groung Hog day with Bill Murray.