The television business lost one of its technological giants yesterday, as Eugene Polley died at the age of 96. Polley, as a young engineer at Zenith Radio Corporation, patented (along with fellow inventor Robert Adler) technology that would become the “Flash-Matic” in 1955. The Flash-Matic was the world’s first wireless TV remote control, and would change the way people watched TV.

Polley would garner 18 patents over the course of his career, nearly all of them related to the television field.

Born in Chicago in 1915, Polley joined Zenith in 1935. For the next 47 years, he would hold numerous roles at the company, developing technology for radios, black and white TVs and eventually color sets.

You can read more about Polley in an obituary from Zenith and his family, here.