Robert Adler
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Robert Adler (December 4, 1913 - February 15, 2007) was an Austrian-American inventor who held numerous patents.
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[edit] Achievements
Adler was born in Vienna, and earned a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Vienna in 1937. After emigrating to the United States, he began working at Zenith Electronics in the research division in 1941. In his lifetime, Adler was granted 180 patents for electronic devices. During World War II, he worked on high-frequency oscillators and electromechanical filters in aircraft radios.
After the war, he went on to work with television technology, where some of his inventions created - from then until his death in 2007 - more or less shaped modern television sets as we today know them. The gated beam vacuum tube not only improved audio quality of television transmissions, but also reduced the cost of manufacturing the sound circuitries (and effectively the television sets themselves).
Adler is also known for his work with surface acoustic wave technology, not only due to the fact that frequency filters based on it are widely used in color television sets, but also because it is used in most touch screen systems.
[edit] Contributions to the remote control
The invention Adler is best known for is the wireless remote control for televisions. While not the first remote control, its underlying technology was a vast improvement over previous remote control systems.
The "Flashmatic" remote control, invented by Eugene Polley, another engineer at Zenith, was the first wireless remote control, replacing the signal cable based remote control devices, which never were a success. The Flashmatic used directional flashlight in the transmitter device, and photo cells in the television set itself. One of the major shortcomings of this technology was that if the television set was exposed to direct sunlight, it could trigger one of the remote control functions inadvertently due to the lack of sufficient protection circuitry, which is why the engineers at Zenith had to go back to the drawing board.
The idea of a radio based system was briefly mentioned, but radio waves travel through walls, and a scenario where a remote control inadvertently changes channels, or performs other commands on a television set located next door, led to that idea quickly being abandoned. Furthermore, the marketing people at Zenith requested a remote control which did not require batteries, as it was perceived at the time that if the battery died, the customer might think something was wrong with the television set itself.
This is where Adler and his remote control concept came in. His idea was to use sound to communicate with a television set instead of light. The first remote control he developed, the "Space Command", used aluminium rods, analogous to tuning forks, struck by hammers toggled by the buttons on the device, to produce high-frequency tones that would be interpreted to control functions by the television set.
In the 1960s, Adler modified the remote control to use ultrasonic signals, a technology which went on to be used in television sets manufactured in the next 25 years.
[edit] Professional accomplishments
By the time of his retirement from Zenith, officially in 1982, Adler was the company's Vice President and Director of Research. He remained a technical advisor to Zenith until 1999. In 1980, Adler was awarded the IEEE's Edison Medal. In 1997, Adler and Polley were jointly awarded an Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Adler's latest patent application was filed on February 1, 2007 for work on touch-screen technology.
[edit] Death
Robert Adler died in a Boise, Idaho nursing home of heart failure at age 93.
[edit] External links
- Inventor of the Week Archive - Robert Adler
- Man who glued TV watchers to the couch dies
- The Inventor Who Deserves a Sitting Ovation - The Washington Post
- Robert Adler, 93; Engineer, Co-Inventor of TV Remote Control - The Washington Post
- Obituary, The Independent, 22 February 2007
- Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 13 March 2007
