Eugene Polley, 1915-2012

“The flush toilet may have been the most civilized invention ever devised, but the remote control is the next most important. It’s almost as important as sex.”
 — Eugene Polley, who took great pride in the fact that he invented wireless television remote control for the Zenith in 1955, died Sunday in Downer’s Grove, Illinois. At first thought, from a certain perspective, it might seem that a) Polley was right about the importance of his invention and that b) he could be the individual most responsible for civilization’s downward slide into sloth, obesity, and soon, oblivion. As the Times’ Margalit Fox points out, thanks to him, “For the first time, viewers could comfortably exercise dominion over sound and image without simultaneously exercising the body on the march between couch and dial.” But when you think about the evolution of our TV-watching habits, if we didn’t have remote control people would have probably just chosen to stay on the same channel for twelve hours at a time rather than get up off the couch to change it when reruns of “Mama’s Family” came on. At least this way we get to watch what we want as we sit ourselves into the abyss. Eugene Polley was 96.