when did tv's first have remote controls
Remote control The first remote intended to control a television was developed by Zenith Radio Corporation in 1950. The remote, called "Lazy Bones", was connected to the television by a wire. A wireless remote control, the "Flashmatic", was developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley. It worked by shining a beam of light onto a photoelectric cell, but the cell did not distinguish between light from the remote and light from other sources. The Flashmatic also had to be pointed very precisely at the receiver in order to work.[8]
Flat panel display The first engineering proposal for a flat-panel TV was by General Electric as a result of its work on radar monitors.[when?] Their publication of their findings gave all the basics of future flat-panel TVs and monitors. But GE did not continue with the R&D required and never built a working flat panel at that time.[1] The first production flat-panel display was the Aiken tube, developed in the early 1950s and produced in limited numbers in 1958. This saw some use in military systems as a heads up display, but conventional technologies overtook its development. Attempts to commercialize the system for home television use ran into continued problems and the system was never released commercially.[2] The Philco Predicta featured a relatively flat (for its day) cathode ray tube setup and would be the first commercially released "flat panel" upon its launch in 1958; the Predicta was a commercial failure. The plasma display panel was invented in 1964 at the University of Illinois, according to The History of Plasma Display Panels.[3] The first active-matrix addressed display was made by T Peter Brody's Thin-Film Devices department at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1968.[4] In 1977, James P Mitchell prototyped and later demonstrated what was perhaps the earliest monochromatic flat panel LED television display LED Display. As of 2012[update], 50% of global market share in flat-panel display (FPD) production is by Taiwanese manufacturers such as AU Optronics and Chimei Innolux Corporation.