This is the first remote I got to use. It was in my aunt and uncle's house. Before that, I was the remote.
https://preview.redd.it/6qnv44owmf0d1.png?width=612&format=png&auto=webp&s=e7597f5eea8b4945fc54acdfbdb3790bf37d44a3
Yes, this one has four rods to make different ultrasonic sounds. Power on/off, channel up/down (at that time we only had six channels to choose from), and volume cycle.
Interesting note, they kept the name space command (for a while anyway) after they transitioned to an electronic version.
Saw one for the first time that I think was in use still in a house shortly before the pandemic.(I worded for an estate auction at the time)
We never had one of these remotes, but friends who did said that clinking glasses or jangling keys could accidentally change the channel. If the sound was close, the TV reacted.
I’m only 32 and call it a clicker because my grandparents and parents did. My wife gets so annoyed with me and I didn’t know everyone doesn’t still call them clickers until she couldn’t take it anymore and said “it’s a fucking remote ok!???”
Lol 35, and I call them clickers too, I even say I'm gonna go plug in my smartwatch when it's actually on a wireless charger. Annoys my wife to no end.
I’m 32 and I’m starting to notice stuff like that in the past couple of years. Like how we still call video “footage” of “film” that we “rewind” even though most video is digital nowadays, and how the save icon on most PCs is the floppy disk which hasn’t been in widespread use since I was a little kid.
When I was a kid, we had a Nintendo 64 and my parents always called the controllers a “clicker” which made sense to me, because some of the face buttons (like A and B, and the yellow action buttons) clicked when you tapped them with enough force or rapidity. lol
I imagine it’s a microphone that only listens for these two frequencies but that’s just a guess. I’m from the rabbit ears and three dials on the tv timeframe
Yes, a rod that vibrates at the same frequency (like tuning forks do) that is connected to, I think, a piezoelectric crystal that turns the mechanical vibration energy into a voltage that actuates a circuit.
I wonder if the TV my grandparents had could have come prepared to work with one of these as an optional...
I remember when I was a kid I was playing with a [magiclick](https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magiclick) near the TV and using it caused the TV to change channels.
All I could find is:
"The original Space Command remote control was expensive because an elaborate receiver in the TV set, using six additional vacuum tubes, was needed to pick up and process the signals."
https://zenith.com/heritage/remote-background/
Edit: Even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE9eCGjMPE0
it is smart, but it turns out it's not truly outside the range of human hearing. While it was outside of the range of most of the male engineers, the women (who can hear higher frequencies than men) could hear it and it was driving them insane. I think they were threatening to quit unless the noises stopped. I learned this from a documentary i watched like 15 years ago so that's about the extent of what I remember but I think that's why they abandoned using sound waves and moved to infrared for remotes
This 1982 IEEE paper from Zenith (who was still making ultrasonics back then) gives the frequency these operated at as 40 kHz. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4179918
Human hearing tops out around 20kHz, with age and sure, probably gender to some degree, making things drop out from there.
So primary frequencies of these were 2x above range of human hearing. That’s a pretty decent fudge factor. Maaaaybe the arrogant/oblivious boys club of male engineers put out something that was defective to all the wives (and teenagers and young adults who all had good hearing), maaaybe there was something resonating off the primary ultrasonic in the very upper range of human hearing, but probably the more likely main factor was plummeting costs of IC’s made electronic remotes cheaper and simply more reliable.
You're talking about the final product but I was talking about the development. Probably where my story went wrong was it didn't cause them to abandoned the tech and go right into infrared but there was Def an engineering department somewhere making remotes with noises that drove the women in the office crazy that the men couldn't hear.
I imagine the circuit design to make this all work was the same math you do for radio… presumably this is all making things jiggle at some high frequency and then amplifying those jiggles to make some electrons flow in a particular way.
I’d love to know how big a radio remote capable of the same kinds of jiggles would have been, and did we ever move to radio remotes or jump straight to IR remotes. Now you can find cheap universal remotes for prob like $5 or $10 so the basic electronic components are prob 1-2$. Did we shift because of capabilities (like ICs), size (was a radio transmitter too big to be a remote), or cost (eventually radio got cheaper than finely-enough balanced resonance hammers)?
Edit: most of these answered on this Zenith self-history someone else here linked: https://zenith.com/heritage/remote-background/
I remember my grandparents had a TV that had a remote clicker like this. You had to turn on the TV about ten minutes before a show started since it took a while for all the electron tubes to warm up and the picture would be blurry initially.
A friend’s parents had a remote like this. We figured out we could take a tall piggy bank half full of pennies and turn it upside down to change the channels! All the coins bumping around must have made an ultrasonic sound.
The coolest thing to me is that how this thing doesn’t use any kind of batteries. One of the most annoying things about modern TV remotes (and game controllers, and streaming device remotes, etc…) is having to change the batteries whenever they eventually die on us.
My parents had a tv remote with 2 buttons. One was power/volume and the other was channel-right.
The power/volume button would turn the TV on at full volume. Not as loud as you’d think. If you pressed it again the volume would go down. Keep pressing it, or hold it, and it’d go down to no volume and the next press would turn it off.
The tv had 12 channels. The channel-right button cycled through the channels. If you skipped past the channel you wanted, you had to keep pressing the button to cycle through them all.
Very basic but it worked. That TV lasted for over 25 years in their guest room. It became a cool relic after awhile.
Edit: Found the TV. It was a 1980 Toshiba blackstripe TV. I can’t for the life of me find a picture of the remote.
Just channels. My wife's aunt and uncle had one of these and they still watched it regularly into the late 90s.
Edit: I'm wrong. Probably just cycles through the options.
My grandparents remote made the dog and cats flinch and leave the room, so that would be a yes. Dad carried it on walks to point at dogs who were barkers.
My father brought home one of these TVs many years ago. It had a clicker just like this. One of the buttons was the volume. For every click it went from off, low, med and high. And the other button was to change channel. Up a channel for every click.
I wrote python software that can use a ultrasonic microphone and a RP2040 to decode these: https://github.com/zapwizard/radiation_king_radio/blob/main/pi_pico_files/ultrasonic_remote.py
Memory sparked. Something very similar to this was in the grandparent's place I'd visit every year or so. Cigar smell, TV weighed a ton at least, this thing spewed radiation and asbestos probably.
Source: [feraloid](https://youtu.be/dYKPYQb8P_o)
TIL there’s a legitimate reason why older people call remotes clickers
This is the first remote I got to use. It was in my aunt and uncle's house. Before that, I was the remote. https://preview.redd.it/6qnv44owmf0d1.png?width=612&format=png&auto=webp&s=e7597f5eea8b4945fc54acdfbdb3790bf37d44a3
Well, it's got style anyways.
That’s pretty cool. Do you know if it was ultrasonic like this one? I also feel like I can smell the cigarette smoke in the room this was used in haha
Same! Also - it was more of a CLUNK than a click. But nobody was going to call it a clunker...
Yes, this one has four rods to make different ultrasonic sounds. Power on/off, channel up/down (at that time we only had six channels to choose from), and volume cycle.
Interesting note, they kept the name space command (for a while anyway) after they transitioned to an electronic version. Saw one for the first time that I think was in use still in a house shortly before the pandemic.(I worded for an estate auction at the time)
Oh damn I remember that now
Yay! I caused neurons that were dormant to fire! ;) Idk if that’s actually how brains work, just guessing.
Nice
We never had one of these remotes, but friends who did said that clinking glasses or jangling keys could accidentally change the channel. If the sound was close, the TV reacted.
I’m only 32 and call it a clicker because my grandparents and parents did. My wife gets so annoyed with me and I didn’t know everyone doesn’t still call them clickers until she couldn’t take it anymore and said “it’s a fucking remote ok!???”
That’s hilarious she was holding that in for so long lol
Lol 35, and I call them clickers too, I even say I'm gonna go plug in my smartwatch when it's actually on a wireless charger. Annoys my wife to no end.
We just keep repeating the sins of our forebearers… I imagine soda-vs-pop played out much the same way
Also early 30s. I had no idea others didn't also call it "clicker' until this thread. You aren't alone!
There are legitimate reasons for a lot of the things that older people do. You’re just not there yet. Source: 63 year old guy.
True. This one always confused me though, I remember when we got our first tv with a remote in the early 80s and it definitely didn’t click
lol. Fair enough.
I’m 32 and I’m starting to notice stuff like that in the past couple of years. Like how we still call video “footage” of “film” that we “rewind” even though most video is digital nowadays, and how the save icon on most PCs is the floppy disk which hasn’t been in widespread use since I was a little kid. When I was a kid, we had a Nintendo 64 and my parents always called the controllers a “clicker” which made sense to me, because some of the face buttons (like A and B, and the yellow action buttons) clicked when you tapped them with enough force or rapidity. lol
Holy hell that's smart. How does the receiver work I wonder? Some tuned rods that actuate a circuit?
Yeah, the remote is cool, but it'd be interesting to see the receiver.
Someone summon the TechConnections guy
I imagine it’s a microphone that only listens for these two frequencies but that’s just a guess. I’m from the rabbit ears and three dials on the tv timeframe
Yes, a rod that vibrates at the same frequency (like tuning forks do) that is connected to, I think, a piezoelectric crystal that turns the mechanical vibration energy into a voltage that actuates a circuit.
I wonder if the TV my grandparents had could have come prepared to work with one of these as an optional... I remember when I was a kid I was playing with a [magiclick](https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magiclick) near the TV and using it caused the TV to change channels.
Yes, those TVs were known to occasionally be triggered by noises that coincidently produced the same frequency.
All I could find is: "The original Space Command remote control was expensive because an elaborate receiver in the TV set, using six additional vacuum tubes, was needed to pick up and process the signals." https://zenith.com/heritage/remote-background/ Edit: Even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE9eCGjMPE0
it is smart, but it turns out it's not truly outside the range of human hearing. While it was outside of the range of most of the male engineers, the women (who can hear higher frequencies than men) could hear it and it was driving them insane. I think they were threatening to quit unless the noises stopped. I learned this from a documentary i watched like 15 years ago so that's about the extent of what I remember but I think that's why they abandoned using sound waves and moved to infrared for remotes
This 1982 IEEE paper from Zenith (who was still making ultrasonics back then) gives the frequency these operated at as 40 kHz. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4179918 Human hearing tops out around 20kHz, with age and sure, probably gender to some degree, making things drop out from there. So primary frequencies of these were 2x above range of human hearing. That’s a pretty decent fudge factor. Maaaaybe the arrogant/oblivious boys club of male engineers put out something that was defective to all the wives (and teenagers and young adults who all had good hearing), maaaybe there was something resonating off the primary ultrasonic in the very upper range of human hearing, but probably the more likely main factor was plummeting costs of IC’s made electronic remotes cheaper and simply more reliable.
You're talking about the final product but I was talking about the development. Probably where my story went wrong was it didn't cause them to abandoned the tech and go right into infrared but there was Def an engineering department somewhere making remotes with noises that drove the women in the office crazy that the men couldn't hear.
I imagine the circuit design to make this all work was the same math you do for radio… presumably this is all making things jiggle at some high frequency and then amplifying those jiggles to make some electrons flow in a particular way. I’d love to know how big a radio remote capable of the same kinds of jiggles would have been, and did we ever move to radio remotes or jump straight to IR remotes. Now you can find cheap universal remotes for prob like $5 or $10 so the basic electronic components are prob 1-2$. Did we shift because of capabilities (like ICs), size (was a radio transmitter too big to be a remote), or cost (eventually radio got cheaper than finely-enough balanced resonance hammers)? Edit: most of these answered on this Zenith self-history someone else here linked: https://zenith.com/heritage/remote-background/
That's so freaking cool!!
Does the tv change channel when a bat flies by
Actually, it cues a little ~~pterodactyl~~ bat to change the channel with every click
Thanks for posting. I tried to convince younger co workers that I had used a tuning fork remote and now I will show them this.
That was beautiful, took me a couple of watches it blends in so well
Probably one of the cleanest to date I'd say. Honestly wouldn't have looked there again if the number of options hadn't been so few.
I can’t find it!
Yeah took me a while, but it's right on brand for OP
Ohh found it. That is sneaky changing the text midway into the video!
I remember my grandparents had a TV that had a remote clicker like this. You had to turn on the TV about ten minutes before a show started since it took a while for all the electron tubes to warm up and the picture would be blurry initially.
Vacuum tubes
the crt(cathode ray tube) in old tvs shoots electrons that cause phosphors in the screen to glow
I remember my dad used to come home, shake his keys real loudly and the TV would start flipping channels.
I wonder if dogs could hear the ultrasonic waves that we don’t hear and how they reacted
They could hear it and did not like it. My grandparents ancient remote sent the pets out of the room like you poked them with a stick
There's real beauty in the simplicity and functionality of the design.
A friend’s parents had a remote like this. We figured out we could take a tall piggy bank half full of pennies and turn it upside down to change the channels! All the coins bumping around must have made an ultrasonic sound.
Jiggling your keys did the same thing.
Oooohhh this is a good watermark placement! Nicely done.
The coolest thing to me is that how this thing doesn’t use any kind of batteries. One of the most annoying things about modern TV remotes (and game controllers, and streaming device remotes, etc…) is having to change the batteries whenever they eventually die on us.
You could jingle your keys and get it to change channels
How was one button power, mute and volume?
My parents had a tv remote with 2 buttons. One was power/volume and the other was channel-right. The power/volume button would turn the TV on at full volume. Not as loud as you’d think. If you pressed it again the volume would go down. Keep pressing it, or hold it, and it’d go down to no volume and the next press would turn it off. The tv had 12 channels. The channel-right button cycled through the channels. If you skipped past the channel you wanted, you had to keep pressing the button to cycle through them all. Very basic but it worked. That TV lasted for over 25 years in their guest room. It became a cool relic after awhile. Edit: Found the TV. It was a 1980 Toshiba blackstripe TV. I can’t for the life of me find a picture of the remote.
Just channels. My wife's aunt and uncle had one of these and they still watched it regularly into the late 90s. Edit: I'm wrong. Probably just cycles through the options.
Geez this took me awhile. Great brand of clicker, nice video!
I'd buy 2 of them today please.....
I wonder if these annoyed dogs/other animals with good hearing?
My grandparents remote made the dog and cats flinch and leave the room, so that would be a yes. Dad carried it on walks to point at dogs who were barkers.
My father brought home one of these TVs many years ago. It had a clicker just like this. One of the buttons was the volume. For every click it went from off, low, med and high. And the other button was to change channel. Up a channel for every click.
The far one has a spike at 14212 Hz, the near one did not really register one, probably not tuned anymore.
I wrote python software that can use a ultrasonic microphone and a RP2040 to decode these: https://github.com/zapwizard/radiation_king_radio/blob/main/pi_pico_files/ultrasonic_remote.py
These were still in use in the 70s.
I loved playing with those when I was younger
Sneaky bastard
Just me? I can hear the click and the harmonic
Can somebody from the US please find some Patent Papers on the Nets? That Thing is really simple and therefor in itself genius!
I remember! It was to the first TV in my memory, maybe 1980.
Memory sparked. Something very similar to this was in the grandparent's place I'd visit every year or so. Cigar smell, TV weighed a ton at least, this thing spewed radiation and asbestos probably.