7 ms·
When we were kids (dating myself here), my friend had a TV with a remote control back when almost nobody had a TV with a remote. You would push the channel-cha
by chrissnell 9y ago
When we were kids (dating myself here), my friend had a TV with a remote control back when almost nobody had a TV with a remote. You would push the channel-change button on it and the channel knob (!!!) on the TV would mechanically turn and the channel would change. Well, apparently, the remote used an almost-audible high frequency to signal a channel change and when his dog ran through the living room, the dog's tags would jingle and change the channel on the TV.
- valleyer 9y agoIf the remote used an almost-audible sound frequency, the dog probably heard it, too... which would basically mean the remote had a failsafe...
- smlacy 9y agoWe had one of these as well -- a fairly standard routine of TV after dinner before going to bed quickly taught the dog that the ultrasonic sound made by the "Off" command to the TV meant "everybody go upstairs and go to bed". You could actually just press that "off" button at any time, and the dog would look around and do that funny "Dog shrug" thing they do, and go upstairs and lie down, even if it was the middle of the day. We had, essentially, a remote controlled dog.
- bambax 9y agoFantastic story, thanks!! ;-)
- __david__ 9y agoMy dog was similar, but the sound he triggered on was the CRT turning off. You could sit perfectly still and press the off button the remote (so as not to give any body language signs) and he'd wake up, and wander off to the bedroom for the night.
- lsaferite 9y agoOh man... I had totally forgotten that sound until you mentioned it.
- Pharylon 9y agoWhen I was young and my hearing was better, I think I had a slightly-better-than-normal upper end to my hearing. Often, I would hear CRTs whining that no one else did. I vividly remember when I realized it. One day in class we were watching a tape and the TV was whining the entire time. After the tape was over, the teacher started talking about what we'd seen, but didn't turn the TV off. I asked him to, because the sound was so annoying. A bunch of kids started saying they didn't hear anything, which made me think I was crazy until one other kid stuck up for me and said she heard it too.
- roryisok 9y agoSame here! I remember waiting for a lift where my friends mother worked, a car rental place. I told her I could hear a TV on somewhere, and she insisted there was no TV nearby. I persisted, it was driving me nuts. Finally, she remembered the cupboard above our heads had a TV in it. She opened the cupboard, and low and behold, it was on, on mute. I felt like I belonged in the X-Men.
- fps 9y agoI can also hear a CRT on anywhere in a house/office. One of the best things about the transition to flat screens is that the annoying high-pitched whine that accompanied CRTs has gone away. Now I only hear mode scanning/input skipping flat screens. At the same time, i do feel like I've lost a bit of a super power.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoYou're hearing the flyback transformer vibrate. I could hear CRT TVs like that, but I haven't been around one in years. In television sets, this high frequency is about 15 kilohertz (15.625 kHz for PAL, 15.734 kHz for NTSC), and vibrations from the transformer core caused by magnetostriction can often be heard as a high-pitched whine. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformer
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thecrazyone 9y agoHaha "remote controlled dog" was funny. You've recreated Pavlov's experiment albeit updated it for our tech century :D
- stevekemp 9y agoI remember when I was a child than my next door neighbour had a remote control on their TV, which was connected to the actual set via a 5m thin cable. I thought it was pretty cool that she could sit on her chair and change the channel & volume without getting up. I suspect that if a dog had been involved that cable would have quickly become a tangled mess! (I'm not sure how common "wired remotes" were, that was certainly the only one I ever saw, in the early eighties.)
- Zancarius 9y agoI only ever saw one wired remote to the best of my recollection. It was on an old Sony Beta tape deck my parents owned. (This is from the 80s as well.)
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- hiharryhere 9y agoI remember seeing a really old pneumatic remote for a TV a long time ago. It was basically a rubber squeeze pump (just like on a blood pressure machine) and a rubber tube connected to the tv. When you squeezed the pump, the pressure in the tube would click the dial forward one notch.
- astura 9y agoReminds me of the time my siblings and I tried to build a manual remote control with K'Nex.
- Kiro 9y ago> the dog's tags would jingle What does this mean?
- dijit 9y agoMetallic dog tags make a jingling sound when the dog moves.
- assblaster 9y agoThe metal pieces would hit each other creating a jingling sound.
- bagels 9y agoI presume, the dog was wearing a collar with some metal tags that bounced off of one another, making sounds of similar frequency to the ultrasonic remote.
- tomcooks 9y agoMerry xmas!
- ptaipale 9y agoWhen working on plain old telephone system (POTS) multiplexers, I came up with the following story which a service engineer insisted was true: An elderly lady with several pets called the operator to say that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called; and that when it did ring, her dog usually barked first. The engineer went to investigate. He climbed a telephone pole next to the house, connected his test set, and rang the line to subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring, but the dog barked loudly. He tried again, now the phone rang. Climbing down from the pole, the engineer found: - This was in a country where the ringing was done from one of the wires against ground (not across the pair) (I think it was England). - A dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar. - The ground post was in dry, poorly conducting ground. - The dog was receiving >50 V of ringing voltage when the phone rang. - With this torturous treatment, the dog would start barking and urinating on the ground. - The wet ground now completed the circuit and the phone would ring. OK, this story has a definite "urban legend" ring to it. Mythbusters wouldn't have tested it with a real dog, I guess.
- mseebach 9y ago> OK, this story has a definite "urban legend" ring to it. Mythbusters wouldn't have tested it with a real dog, I guess. It would be easy enough to test without involving a dog. They've done plenty of electric-shock myths with ballistic gel dummies.
- ptaipale 9y agoFair enough, but they'd have to build a voltage-triggered barking device in the gelatin dummy to make it sufficiently life-like.
- bartread 9y agoThis story has been doing the rounds since at least the 1980s. I remember hearing it from a BT engineer who was visiting our school back in the day. No idea if it's true or not, but it had certainly reached UK shores as of ~30 years ago.
- 9y ago
- lakkal 9y agoIn about 1977, we had a TV with a remote control. Very often, sneezing would cause the channel to change. I think jingling a keychain would cause it to happen, too.