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Meet the American who invented the TV remote control

Polley worked for Zenith Electronics for 47 years, climbing his way up from stock boy to groundbreaking inventor. He developed 18 different patents. To get more news about AC remote, you can visit remotescn.com official website.

His most consequential innovation, the first wireless TV remote control, was called the Flash-Matic. The few previous control devices were hard-wired to the television.

It looked like a science-fiction ray gun. It operated the boob tube with beams of light.

Polley’s Flash-Matic replaced the only known remote control TV technology at the time, the 8-year-old child.

This primitive and often unreliable form of human labor had begrudgingly walked back and forth to change channels on demand for adults and older siblings ever since the advent of television. When kids changed the channel, they usually had to adjust the rabbit ears, too," joked Zenith senior vice president and company historian John Taylor.

Like millions of Americans over age 50, Taylor logged countless unpaid hours of his youth clicking the dials on the family TV set.

The Flash-Matic offered a "startling new kind of television," Zenith announced in a press release dated June 13, 1955.The new product, Zenith stated, "uses a flash beam from a small pistol-shaped gadget to turn the set on or off change channels or cut out the sound of long-winded commercials."

The Zenith announcement continued, "The magic ray (which is harmless to humans) does all the work. No dangling wires or connected cords are needed." For many people, it’s the most-used object in everyday life," the inventor, at that point long retired, told Sports Illustrated in 1999.

The descendants of his innovation are everywhere today. Most people have several TV remotes at home, with more at the office or the job site — and maybe one in an SUV. Despite the ubiquity of the TV remote, the name of its inventor was almost lost to history.

Elvis Presley is more famous than Eugene Polley simply because he could swivel his hips.Yet who impacts our lives more each day? Eugene Polley had to fight for his legacy after credit for inventing the TV remote first went to a rival engineer. Eugene Joseph Polley was born in Chicago to Anthony and Veronica (Wachowski) on Nov. 29, 1915.

Both were of Polish descent. Veronica came from a well-off family but married a "black sheep" husband, the inventor's son, Gene Polley Jr., told Fox News Digital.