Late last week, Peter and I—for reasons I’ve forgotten now—got on the topic of remote controls. I’ve talked about it before in other articles, but my dad was a TV repairman back when a TV could actually be repaired. My formative years were spent around all types of old and broken electronics. I’ve seen all manner of remote controls.

Remotes are a gadget with a weird history behind them.

Did you know there was a specific type of remote control that would drive dogs absolutely crazy? It worked off ultrasonic frequencies instead of infrared light, and dogs could hear those ultra-high-pitched tones. The remotes generated these tones by clinking against a bar of metal when the button was pushed. To the casual observer, it sounded like a click. So, if you’ve ever heard someone call a remote control a clicker… it’s because of these.

Want to know what the first remote control was? No, it wasn’t “whichever child was sitting closest to the television set”. It had nothing to do with TV at all. Notable 19^th Century inventors all tinkered with remote controls—Marconi and Tesla both had radio control experiments on record. But the most significant experiment, and arguably the first true remote control, belonged to Spaniard Leonardo Torres Quevedo, who guided an empty boat to shore in 1906 using a radio controller.

If you want to be particular, and limit it to consumer devices, Philco had the first wireless remote control. It was called the Philco Mystery Control, it debuted in 1939, and it controlled a radio.

And, as a final note: in all my research on remotes, no one knows WHY popping the battery cover off your remote and rolling the batteries around gets you a few more weeks of TV control. But, in all my research, no one refuted the fact that it DOES work.