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Originally Posted by Oldstuff78
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No. That single-button unit looks more like it was introduced in the Zenith line of portable TVs in the 1970s. This type of remote was not used with consoles or table models with a CRT larger than thirteen inches.
In the early '50s, Zenith's very first attempt at remote control for their television receivers was the "Lazy Bones", which was a wired remote. The remote unit operated all basic functions of the TV (on/off, volume up/down, channel up/down and probably mute), but the thick, multiconductor cable running across the floor from the set to the viewer's couch or easy chair was unsightly and a safety hazard, not necessarily in that order. Zenith's first ultrasonic wireless remote was introduced in the late fifties and was an improvement over the Lazy Bones, in that the ultrasonic signals it employed to activate the TV's control functions eliminated the long control cable. However, the new ultrasonic remote system, dubbed "Space Command" (a name that was used by Zenith until at least the '70s), had at least one minor flaw: the remote functions could be activated by stray noises in the same room as the TV, as well as by the ultrasonic control signals from the hand unit. There were reports of these sets switching on for no apparent reason in the middle of the night; this often happened if the owner's dog, for example, walked in front of the set and the dog's tags clinked against its collar. The resulting sound was often of just the right frequency to activate the on/off function, volume up or down, channel up or down, etc.
A similar (and much more exasperating) problem reared its ugly head in 1955 when Zenith introduced its "FlashMatic" TV remote, which was the company's very first attempt at wireless remote control. It used a ray-gun shaped device that looked for all the world like a flashlight, which when aimed at one of four photocells at each corner of the CRT mask would activate TV on/off, mute, or channel up/down. However, this system had a very serious flaw in that, if sunlight or other types of stray lighting hit one or more of those cells, the television would go crazy. Depending on which cell(s) was/were being illuminated at the time, the set could switch on/off at random, change channels by itself, the sound would switch on and off (mute/unmute), etc. If all four cells were illuminated at once, all hell would break loose (all basic functions of the television operating simultanerously), as this system had no lock-out schemes to prevent false triggering. I have often wondered how many FlashMatic sets wound up in repair shops due to burned-out tuner drive motors or stripped tuner drive gears, if or when the tuner tried to rotate in both directions at the same time when both channel-change cells were illuminated (accidentally) at once.
Another minor flaw of this system was that the photocells at each corner of the CRT mask were not labeled, so viewers often could not remember which cell controlled which function--leading to inadvertent activations of the wrong one, say muting the sound when the viewer actually wanted to change channels.
Because of these problems, the FlashMatic was withdrawn from the market after about 1956 and was replaced by the ultrasonic Space Command remote system. The latter was the standard for Zenith TV remotes for about the next 25 years, until the infrared remote system was developed. The IR system is now used in all TVs (including Zenith) manufactured since the early eighties; it is impervious to extraneous noises and almost impossible to trigger accidentally, since it responds only to its own IR control signals.