Inventor of remote control dies

Eugene J. Polley, the man who invented the wireless remote control and changed the way we watched television, died last week.

Polley was an engineer at Zenith when the company was one of the leading TV manufacturers. In 1950 the company developed a remote control that attached to the set by a cord.  Five years later, Polley came up with the idea of a wireless device that sent light beams to receptors on the set to change channels and turn the set on and off. 

With a price tag of $100, the Flash-Matic, as it was known, initially was a luxury device for most consumers.  And since there were only three TV networks, there was no great need for the luxury.  But with the explosion of cable channels starting in the 1980s, the remote soon became ubiquitous. We have Eugene Polley to thank for that.

Penn State wins national championship

Penn State's College of Communications won its first-ever national championship in the overall intercollegiate writing-broadcasting-photojournalism-multimedia standings in the Hearst Journalism Awards Program.

Penn State finished first in writing; fourth in photojournalism; seventh in multimedia; and eighth in broadcasting. The college captured seven individual top-10 student finishes in writing; two top-10 individual finishes in photojournalism; one top-10 individual finish in radio; and one individual top-10 finish in multimedia.

The annual Hearst Journalism Awards Program in writing, broadcasting, photojournalism and multimedia is open to students from the country’s 108 nationally accredited mass communication programs.  Now in its 52nd year, the competion draws more than 1,000 student entries each year. 

Congratulations to all the talented students who made this a historic year for the college.

Pictorial correspondents of the Civil War

The current issue of National Geographic has an interesting article about Civil War sketch artists. The article is written by Harry Katz, who with co-author Vincent Virga, has published a new book, Civil War Sketch Book: Drawings from the Battlefront.  I have written about sketch artists in my book, Civil War Journalism, which will be published later this year.  As Katz notes, the stories of the dedicated sketch artists, which included the likes of Alfred Waud (pictured above), Edwin Forbes, Henry Lovie, and Winslow Homer, have largely gone overlooked. Fortunately, that is changing.