The year 1955 was a big one for inventions. It brought us Velcro, Play-Doh and that green bean with mushroom soup glop that is required by law to be on every American’s Thanksgiving Day dinner table

But when it came to making us fat, dumb and happy, no one did more that year than Eugene T. Polley.

Mr. Polley, who died last week at the age of 96, invented the television remote control. It was called Flash-Matic Tuning and, as the newspaper ads proclaimed, “You have to see it to believe it!”

Simply by aiming a gun-shaped device at your Zenith television ($399.95 for the deluxe model with blond grained finish cabinet), you could turn it on or off and “shut off long annoying commercials while picture remains on screen!” All without the physical exertion of getting out of your chair, walking across the room and turning a dial.

There was no longer a need to sit through programs such as “Meet the Press” that threatened to bring knowledge into our living rooms. Just aim the Flash-Matic at one corner of the 21-inch screen and, zap, we had “Dragnet,” “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin” or “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.”

To a generation for which any activity worth doing can be accomplished by the click of a mouse or a swipe on an iPhone screen, a device that controlled a television might not seem like much.

But to those of us who were convinced that the only reason our parents had us was so they could make us get up every half hour and change the channel for them, it was just slightly short of a miracle.

As Mr. Polley himself modestly declared in a 2002 interview, “The flush toilet may have been the most civilized invention ever devised, but the remote control is the next most important. It’s almost as important as sex.”

But, like sex, Flash-Matic wasn’t always perfect. The system was light-activated, which meant the channel might be switched back to “Meet the Press” by a stray beam of intrusive sunlight. So the following year it was succeeded by Space Command, which used high-frequency sound waves. Light didn’t affect it, although the sounds of keys jangling could. And, while inaudible to humans, the sound could trigger yowls of protest from the family pooch.

Still, the impact on American sloth of Mr. Polley’s invention can’t be overlooked.

As the ads put it, “A flash of light from across the room (no wires, no cords) turns set on, off or changes channels ... and you remain in your easy chair!”

Which is where many of us have remained ever since.

Contact this columnist at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com.