Couch Potatoes in mourning

Another headline could be 'The Inventor who deserves a sitting ovation'.
The man who glued TV viewers to the sofa died recently. Robert Adler
passed away at the age of 93 in an Idaho nursing home. A native of
Vienna, Austria, Adler emigrated to the United States prior to WWII;
during the war, he worked on the development of technology for radio
and communication systems. After the war he moved on to television
technology; he worked for Zenith for 6 decades and was credited with
over 180 U.S. patents. His best known invention was the 1956 Zenith
Space Command remote control. Another Zenith inventor, Eugene
Polley, had created a remote a year earlier, but it was Adler who
introduced ultrasonic high frequency to it, making the remote more
efficient. (Zenith credits both Polley and Adler as co-inventors of the
remote control.) Throughout his life Adler felt that many of his other
inventions that had been useful during WWII, and later on in the
advancement of the space program, were more important; his wife
even stated that he wasn't much of a TV buff, that he preferred to read.
But in reality, it was the remote control that had a more of a long
reaching effect and influence on daily life. There are remotes now for
the garage door, to start and lock your car, for the stereo, and much
more. Adler even had a hand in the development of touch screen
innovations, color television, even cellular phone technologies. Clearly
he was one of the major scientific figures of the 20th century. Thank
you for everything Mr. Adler.