life-changing invention, he kept it under wraps.
"People ask me all the time, 'Don't you feel guilty for it?' " he once told an interviewer.
"And I say that's ridiculous."
As the inventor of the television remote control, Adler was arguably the father of modern sloth. But many, Adler included, have opposition to ice-cream.
"It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television," he once argued reasonably and rationally.
Before his death last month at the age of 93, he could have taken comfort in knowing that for each detractor, a dozen more activity from the act of watching television.
It is unlikely, for obvious reasons, that Adler's grave in Boise, Idaho, will become a place of pilgrimage for those paying between the couch and the television set with a single digit.
boom-boom comedy oeuvre, such as Jimmy Kimmel ("At Mr Adler's quarter, a gum wrapper and a comb.")
symbol of modern life while simultaneously shaping it. Questions remain.
Was he infirm, for example, or simply lazy? Was he a religious man, and if so, why did he try to overrule God on the issue of legs?
the uses of consumer electronics.
Zenith Electronics Corporation, retiring officially as research until the age of 85 in 1999.
television, leading to the development of commercial-free subscription TV, but until that happy day he decided to do the annoying sound of advertisements.
remote control, appropriately named the "Lazy Bones", which was connected to the TV with a wire.
Customers reported that they liked the concept but tripped over the ugly cable.
communicate with the television set. The "Zenith Space Command" went into production in 1956, the same year Australians were introduced to the most rudimentary form of the box.
The irony is that the original channel surfer - the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was coined by The Wall Adler's widow, Ingrid, whom he married in 1998 after the death of his first wife several years earlier, said he did not spend much time watching TV. With more than 180 patents to his name, the most in touch-screen technology, perhaps he didn't manage to find the time.
Adler's invention was deceptively simple, yet its influence infiltrated other areas of human endeavour.
Other gadgets may have more profoundly altered human society - the gun, the plane, computers, and, indeed, television - but the remote control has the eliminating the need for any exertion. Its adoption en masse was remarkable. In the space of 50 years it has become as ubiquitous as a remote control.
control with a special Emmy in 1997. The device, which put control in the hands of consumers, came to symbolise the American way.
But Adler's legacy is not all bells and whistles.
His invention addiction and the handy scapegoat for other contemporary ills.
Laziness, inattentiveness, hyperactivity and, ironically, disconnectedness, have been blamed on the remote control. Sociologists see its overuse as a kind of hyper-modern Tourette's, while colloquially, if something or someone is on "remote control" they are zombie-like and unthinking.
The couch potato's pin-up boy, Homer Simpson, even has a special T-shirt remote control holster.
asking the wrong question. Would television be even barely tolerable without the remote control?
Larissa Dubecki is a staff writer.
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