• Corpus ID: 1810315

The Remote Control and Beyond: The Legacy of Robert Adler

@inproceedings{Acebrn2007TheRC,
  title={The Remote Control and Beyond: The Legacy of Robert Adler},
  author={Juan A. Acebr{\'o}n and Renato Spigler},
  year={2007}
}

• J. Acebrón, R. Spigler
• Published 2007
• Physics

Robert Adler, best known as the co-inventor of the television remote control, died in February at the age of 93. He had been active, as a con-sultant in ultrasonics, well beyond the age of 90. Indeed, the last of his approximately 180 U.S. patents is dated February 1, 2007—two weeksbefore his death.Adler was born in Vienna in 1913 and received a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1937. Not long afterward he fledVienna for the United States, to escape Nazi persecution. In the U.S. he took a position at Zenith Corporation, where he would co ntinue to workfor 60 years.Adler’s TV remote control systems had predecessors. In 1950 engineers at the Zenith Radio Corporation (later renamed Zenith ElectronicsCorporation) resorted to cumbersome wires to produce a system known as “Lazy Bones.” In 1955 Zenith engineer Eugene Polley proposed aphotocellular device without wire, the “Flashmatic.” But both systems had problems:A wire running across a living room was not sa fe, and pho-tocells were too sensitive to sunlight.It was in this setting that Adler, then working at Zenith headquarters in Chicago, had the idea of using ultrasonic waves to control a televi-sion. This marked the birth of a truly convenient and reliable remote control system. Designed in 1955, the device went into pro duction in 1956.Details can be found in [2].Most current remote control devices are operated by infrared signals; Adler’s invention dominated the market for more than 25 years, how-ever, and for this reason he is often called “the father of the TV remote control.” Less well known is that Adler also did early work on certainhighly nonlinear oscillating circuits, which led eventually to the well-known Kuramoto model of synchronization.Near the end of 2003, in private correspondence with one of us (R.S.), Adler wrote that in the 1940s, he and others at Zenith were interestedin reducing the number of vacuum tubes in an FM radio. The possibility that a locked oscillator might offer a solution inspired his 1946 paper,“A Study of Locking Phenomena in Oscillators” [3]. He did not continue to explore this topic, turning his attention instead to special-purposevacuum tubes, low-noise amplifiers, and ultrasonic devices. But in October 1973, a quarter of a century after the appearance of the paper,Anthony Siegman of Stanford arranged for its republication in the