Frustrating as They Are, We Still Can't Live Without TV Remotes LG Electronics, via Associated Press Flash-Matic, right, was invented by Eugene J. Polley, top right, who died May 20. A 1956 Zenith ad shows how the device worked. Today, Ident Technology's prototype Gesture Remote, right, allows users to control TV with a wave of the hand. IT started out in the 1950s as an effort-saving gadget, like the electric can opener or electronic car keys. It evolved into a necessity, a cultural magic wand that has transformed the relationship of viewers to their televisions, and the style and content of the programs on view. Today, American television viewers click away at some 335 million TV remotes - nearly three per household. No longer a curiosity, the remote is as much a part of the American home as the personal computer or the cellphone. The novelist Saul Bellow denounced it as a malign invention whose invitation to jump from channel to channel, scrambling stories, "makes mental mincemeat of us." Ellen Goodman called it "the most reactionary implement currently used to undermine equality in modern marriage" in a 1992 column for The Boston Globe, noting its resemblance to a royal scepter and the tendency of men to dictate its use. "It really changed, in a fundamental way, our interaction with technology and with each other," said Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture and the author of "Our Own Devices." Think of the clickers that allow us to communicate with all sorts of electronic devices. The TV remote was the origin of that idea. No one foresaw the transformative power of the device when Zenith unveiled the first cordless remote, the Flash-Matic, in 1955. Created by Eugene J. Polley, who died May 20 at 96, it looked like a small ray gun. By directing a beam of light at four photo cells, one at each corner of the screen, the viewer could change channels up or down, and increase or decrease the volume. The company's advertisements proclaimed the Flash-Matic "a marvel of the electronic age that gives you remote control without wires, cables or cords." Unlike the Lazy Bones, Zenith's first remote, introduced in 1950, it did not have a wire connecting it to the television. But it did have other drawbacks. The photocells could be activated randomly by bright sunlight during the day, and by the lights of passing cars at night. Nevertheless, Mr. Polley regarded his device with satisfaction. "It makes me think my life was not wasted," he told The Baltimore Sun in 2000. Maybe I did something for humanity, like the guy who invented the flush toilet. Robert Adler, the inventor of the Lazy Bones, carried remote technology forward with an ultrasound device called the Space Command. Viewers could press one of four buttons on a box to turn the television on and off, change channels and adjust the volume. Each key, with a sharp click, struck an aluminum rod that sent ultrasound waves to the receiver in the set. The Space Command was introduced in 1956 and lived on into the age of transistor technology in the early 1960s. With the arrival of infrared technology in the early 1980s, it became obsolete, but by that time the remote had already made deep inroads into American life. In 1965, the first year that statistics were kept on sales of televisions with remote controls, only 1 in 20 sets came with a remote control, which, because it added to the cost, came only with color models. By 1985, half of all color sets came with a remote control, and by 1988, three-quarters. For the big networks, the remote, the VCR and multiple cable channels formed an axis of evil. The ray-gun design of the Flash-Matic, it turned out, was a kind of omen. Programming executives now faced a world in which "the audience was armed," as James Gleick put it in "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything." Television began to change, rapidly and profoundly, as power shifted from corporate offices to increasingly fickle viewers. After a research team at NBC discovered that 25 percent of its audience changed channels when credits rolled, the network introduced the format known as "squeeze and tease" in 1999. Credits were consigned to a third of the screen, running simultaneously with promotional spots intended to keep the viewers hooked. The networks either abandoned or modified strategies they had relied on for decades. Increasingly, television shows were "top-loaded." That is, flashy production values were given prominence at the beginning of shows, to entice restless eyes, and commercials were moved to the middle. The transition from one show to the next became almost seamless, with viewers thrust into new narratives almost before they knew the old one had come to its end. The visual style of television became much faster and jumpier to stave off visual ennui.