The buttons on Zenith’s original “clicker” remote were a mechanical marvel

God I love learning about analog tech! Very creative design!

You'd love Technology Connections on YouTube if you haven't seen him already.
It just feels so much more clever than the modern stuff, even if it's much more complicated overall now.

Funny, when I was a little kid my grandmother had a Zenith TV with that exact remote. I still remember the long throw and clank of those buttons. TV remotes were uncommon then so I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Yeah dating myself here.

My grandmother had one of these.

I somehow discovered that if I took this magnetic screwdriver, and this bent piece of coat hanger and slapped them together, her tv would turn off.

I fucked with her so much she took her tv to a repair shop because she thought it was broken.

Good times.

I think this is hacking in its purest form. You’ve discovered a new way to do something unexpected, and you went ahead with it just because you could.

If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a TV remote as a “clicker,”

I say this to my son sometimes. "Throw me the clicker." The first time he looked at me like WTF are you talking about. Told him it's another name for the remote, but didn't tell him why, so he still has no idea

My grandpa had a tv store around the time, and he always told the story of him pulling someone's leg by making them believe the tv was voice activated, with that thing in his pocket. So he covered the click sound by yelling at the tv.

I like your grandpa.
I once told my friend that my car was self driving. Little did she know I was driving with my knee.

We had one of those TVs when I was a kid... and our dog had one of those metal link collars, and when she would shake her head the TV would change channels, and the volume would change. :). I had forgotten all about that.

Yep, my neighborhood friend had one. I discovered that my keys, when shook, would hit the frequencies to do stuff too. His dad was annoyed by it and I don’t know if he figured out how his TV would spontaneously change to channels
- Reminds me of getting trolled by my friend with an IR blaster on his phone. Took me way too long to catch on. Simpler times...

Modern design is boring and ugly as hell compared to what engineers and designers were able to come up with decades back.

Modern ‘design’ is all about pushing physicality and tactility out of the way, in an attempt to focus as much of your attention into your display as possible. As a result, everything aside from your screen has been ‘pushed aside’.

I get it, I really do…but it’s all so depressingly sterile.
- There's a great YouTube channel of this younger guy who teaches design and he makes very good videos that dissect a lot of the BS design trends. One of them is taking the old school "less is more" type of thinking into a stupid extreme. He explains that far too many designers are missing the deeper meaning in that design ethos which ends up making the user experience MORR complicated all so they could save adding an extra button to make navigating the device's interface infinitely easier.
- I think it also often simply boils down to cost. A cheap touch screen or capacitive button is much cheaper than adding durable buttons with a satisfying click

Would it have been possible for the speakers of the time to emit those frequencies? Imagining the equivalent of a Twitch raid: "I'm done broadcasting so I'm going to send you to the next channel."

Possibly. Still nott as bad as, "Alexa, order a 12pack of dildos"
We had a TV that used ultrasonic sound to control the TV, When I was young I could fairly hear the tone from a couple of the buttons, though super faintly, but the dog would cock its head when certain buttons were used.
It would have been possible, but it would have been expensive and required electricity to work. The fact that they accomplished their goal with what amounts to a set of tiny spring-powered mechanical bells is a marvel.
- I meant it more in the sense of one channel, when shutting down for the night, emitting the "next channel" tone such that every viewer's set would change to a channel that was still broadcasting.
Not really sure, doesn't seem like they'd bother to deaign speakers that make sounds we can't hear or broadcast them but that doesn't mean it wasn't possible

This is a really neat way to pull off remote technology. I wonder if there are still any applications for this type of ultrasound remote tech.

I remember people claiming they could activate these by flexing cans.
- That would make sense, flexing cans would create the ultrasonic noise the TV is listening for. Even still, I think it's a neat technology.

"Again, it required no batteries — much desired by Zenith, as the company didn’t want customers to think a TV was broken when the battery died."

Was this really that big of a concern? Did people really think that LMAO

Layer 8 issues occur all the time.
- What's layer 8
In a world where remotes are scarce, I could see how this would be a concern, yes.
- Where remotes are scarce? What do you mean by that, are you talking about the time when they came in or now
Even today, in tech support, the issue is very often the user

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_error
- Yeah, makes sense now that I think about it. People are always dumber than you think
If you're planning on selling 1 million units, a half of a percent of people making that mistake means a big headache.

That's surprisingly cool

Damn that's interesting, I had heard of the light control but never these

That looks like it was so satisfying to click.

That was incredibly interesting.

My aunt and uncle still had a TV with one of these things when I was growing up in the 90s (the 70s version). The buttons had a distinct and satisfying click to them.

There was only one volume button, and and each press would turn up the volume in 3-4 steps and then cycle around to mute. You couldn't turn the volume down without turning it up first. If you wanted more fine control you still had to get up and adjust the volume knob on the set.

I wonder what my aunt and uncle eventually did with that big old box. It belongs in a museum.

My parents had an appliance/electronics shop when I was growing up and they took used items on trade occasionally. Someone turned in one of those zenith sets and I actually got to use that remote. Bear in mind we were well into the age of infrared remotes by this point (late 80s).

It was definitely interesting and I think I could just distinguish the difference between the sounds of the buttons.

I know this is about the tech, but OP's name is just cracking me up. Thank you @FartsWithAnAccent

Interesting purely mechanical design. Our first remote (that didn't have a cable connection) used sound as well, but it was battery powered and as a kid, I could hear at least some of those sounds. It had way more than just 4 buttons though, maybe the mechanical design hits a limit there at some point (or electronics just got cheaper).

I thought this thing was a gag at first, but that's actually really clever. I wonder if dogs would hate it.

The article does indicate that animals were sensitive to the noises:

"It did have its flaws: people found that jingling keys or coins could be picked up by the TV’s microphones and accidentally change the channel, and the high-pitch frequencies from the remote were discernible by pets."

Quite ingenious and simple design, even considering the limitations of the time.

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Old-school tech came up with some of the most elegant solutions sometimes. This is quite neat, I wonder if it could be improved upon with modern signal processing.

I actually, at one point, possessed and used an ancient "wooden console" type television, I actually even have a picture of me in front of it somewhere at age 6 or something, anyways, it had this style of remote, it really was a Space Age wonder, even as the television looked like your typical ugly chest of drawers.

Genius is in simplicity

How I hate those "new" web pages spending 8 pages on fluff before even explaining how it works.

Thank you Google algorithm (it detects how long time you spend on a page after a search).

So after scrolling up, down left and right, I didn't find it (guess it's sound?).

Long-form journalism predates google by a few centuries.

Out of the 15 paragraphs, it says it uses sound in the 3rd and explains the mechanism in the 4th.

I agree that they should've put it in the title or the lead, but this wasn't a news pice, it's a monthly column focused on analog buttons. The first 2 paragraphs rightfully contextualise the hardware to an era most of us don't know much.
- I was quite used to sift through paragraphs, chapters or even books to learn. I might be wrong but (lot of) web pages have uniformally adepted this way of presenting any kind of information because (again I might be wrong) search algorithms thinks you found what you searched for when you stop searching (for at least a minute or maybe 10, I don't know the exact details).
  
  So adding the history of whatever you're searching for, maybe mudding the waters a bit and stuff some uninteresting piece at the end will keep you there. I think it's called enshittifycation when it happens to a website, but maybe its the same for search engines.
Interesting. The link jumps straight to the article for me. No guessing involved. Yes, it's mechanically produced ultrasonic tones.