Dead, Not Forgotten

John Murdock was full of inventiveness; it was something that he couldn’t resist. After all, when one resists experience they foil discovery, and discovery is the foundation of invention (other famous sayings on this topic not withstanding). The process of discovery never ended for John Murdock. He took his last engineering course in the fall of 2006.

A thoughtful inventor who was always driven by application, John Murdock spent his first 45 years in business as a co-founder of Perlite Corp, a company that manufactured equipment to expand perlite, a volcanic rock, for industrial purposes.

After retirement in 1985 Murdock joined the International Executive Service Corps and consulted for mining interests in Zimbabwe and Turkey.

Apparently John Murdock could not quit it though. Next was a lap pool that one swims in place in, and then, a driveway device that turns your vehicle around in place. Murdock understood the value of big ideas in small places.

In addition to inventions like a combination haircutter and vacuum appliance and a directional hearing aid to be used in crowds, John Murdock was concerned about global warning and had recently been developing concepts for a small sea-based nuclear reactor as a power source and was investigating the possibility of using decommissioned Russian nuclear submarines to generate electricity.

He became a pacifist, his daughter Jean Warrington said, after watching hungry German soldiers come out of hiding to trade their guns for hot food.

John Murdock died at age 87 at his Swarthmore, MA home on Feb. 16, 2007 of multiple myeloma.

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Robert Adler has been blinding us with his science for over 50 years now. During his 60 year career with television giant Zenith, Robert Adler was proud of the advances he made in the many areas of science he contributed to such as touch screen technology and cellular phones.

But he will be remembered by the common, couch potato man as a co-inventor of the TV remote control.

Adler’s 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control built upon Eugene Polley’s “Flashmatic,” a wireless remote introduced in 1955 that operated on photo cells. Adler introduced ultrasonics, or high-frequency sound, to turn it into the device we are familiar with today. Though they did not work directly together, Zenith credited them as co-inventors. In 1997 the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded both Adler and Polley an Emmy for their work.

Often asked if he felt guilty about creating the phenomenon of couch potatoes, he replied like an engineer. He said, “It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”

Though the television remote control has never reached the full potential that many have wished for it, the ability to turn other people off, it is certainly one of the most influential technology tidbits of modern times. Robert Adler’s (and Eugene Polley’s) invention can now be seen turning on and off just about everything.

Let’s have ten laps around the couch in honor of Robert Adler who died Thursday, February 15, 2007 of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at age 93.

For more information:
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/adler.html

http://www.zenith.com/sub_about/about_adler.html

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