Robert Adler, who died Thursday at 93, denied that his most famous invention, the television remote control, was his most important, and he denied that it was a menace to society because it sprouted couch potatoes.

“I don’t take responsibility for couch potatoes,” Adler told the Associated Press in 1996. “They really should exercise.”

Adler, who worked for decades as an electronics engineer for Zenith and retired as its vice president for research in 1979, invented the device in 1956 in response to a challenge from Zenith’s president, Eugene McDonald, to come up with something to eliminate commercials.

One of the fundamental features of Adler’s remote was a mute button, not that anybody was calling it a mute button in those days. “Turns set on or off … turns sound on or off … changes channels … foolproof,” ran the advertising copy of the day.

McDonald attributed Zenith’s success the following year to “remote TV tuning,” which, he pointed out, helped eliminate “long, annoying commercials.” But in nearly the same breath, McDonald derided color TV as a hobbled technology and said cable TV was the wave of the future. Which it was, but decades later.

Adler’s was not the first television remote, merely the first practical one. An invention from the early 1950s called “Blab-off” was a remote volume control — and cost only $2.99, while Zenith’s “Space-Command” remote control added $100 to the cost of a set. Zenith itself had introduced an early remote with a cord, called “Lazy Bones,” and then in 1955, the first cordless model. That model, the Flash-Matic, was powered by visible light and was vulnerable to interference from lamps, flashbulbs, or anything else that emitted light.

“Sometimes,” Adler told the Palm Beach Post in 2002 in his Austrian accent, “all hell would break loose.”

Adler’s version of the remote harnessed ultrasound — a newfangled enough idea that was called “silent sound” — generated by short aluminum rods. Since the buttons struck the rods to create the tones, it didn’t need batteries. (The noises it made apparently led to it being dubbed a “clicker.”)

On the downside, it weighed a very un-Space Age 8 ounces. Or, in the words of the Chicago Tribune’s television critic in 1957, “only 8 ounces.”

History provides multiple perspectives. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorialized in 1956 that Zenith’s “unsung inventor” was a “mad genius … on a par with that other benefactor of mankind who devised the five-button tuning on automobile radios.”

Adler’s clicker remained the dominant form of TV remote until the early 1980s, when ultraviolet light emerged as the coming technology. At that point, according to Zenith, only one in eight homes had a remote. The profusion of cable stations and the light, flexible remote based on UV light, arose together, to Adler’s slight consternation.

He was especially offended by the multiplication of poorly labeled buttons. “I think it’s scandalous how little the people who design these things seem to keep in mind that people don’t know it by heart as they do,” he told the Associated Press in 2004. His original Space-Command model had only four buttons.

But Adler, whose favorite inventions included touch screens and components for missile tracking, seemed on the whole unimpressed by his clicker.

“It’s not like the invention of fire,” he said in the Palm Beach Post interview. “It seemed like an accident that this particular thing became wildly popular.”

Adler was born in Austria in 1913 and received his doctorate in engineering from the University of Vienna in 1937. He fled Europe in 1940 and went to work at the Zenith Radio Corp. in Chicago in 1941.

Working on a wide variety of electronic problems, he went on to register more than 200 patents. In 1980, he was the recipient of the IEEE Edison Medal for work on electronic beam tubes and ultrasonic devices. He was also among the initiating group of inductees to the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, in 2000.

Adler told interviewers that he watched only an hour or so of television each week. In retrospect, he thought his remote had failed to fulfill its mission of eliminating commercials. “When you kill the sound on the commercial,” he lamented to the Chicago Tribune in 1996, “you are sort of sentenced to continue watching it until it is over.”