It began with something TV viewers of the 21st Century can still identify with – anger over the adverts.

In the 1950s in the US, Zenith Electronics president Eugene F McDonald gave the company’s engineers a challenge: he hated having to sit through adverts. He wanted a device that could let him mute them, or skip to another channel (…where hopefully something other than adverts were playing).

The remote control as we know it was born.

McDonald’s wish spawned a revolution, changing the way we watched television – less as a passive observer, more a ruthless overseer. If we didn’t like what we saw, a new channel was the flick of a switch away.

You might also like:

Zenith’s game-changing device was called the Flashmatic, designed by an engineer called Eugene Polley and released in 1955.

“He was not an electrical engineer, but a mechanical engineer,” says John Taylor, the in-house historian for Zenith and a press director at its parent company LG, of Polley. “So the device was largely mechanical.”

There had been devices that could change TV channels before, but these had been attached to the television itself – the remote connected by an umbilical cord. The most famous of these was Zenith’s own Lazy-Bones. It allowed the user to turn the TV on or off and change channels – but not mute those pesky commercials.