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succeeded in getting the device to work, and it “plagued” him, as my mother moaned when he sank into a blue funk over his failure. As I recall the gadget, it wasn’t going to do anything more than turn the television set on and off and raise or lower the volume. Before my father began this project, I had already built, from a kit advertised in the back pages of IC, an “electric eye” that would have done the job of turning the set on and off and could have been triggered by a flashlight from my father’s chair, which would have qualified it as a wireless remote control, so it seemed to me that I could have solved half of his problem without really trying, and I felt a brief superiority until I began to try to figure out how the electric eye could be modified to control the volume and saw how much more difficult that was. My father dismantled the device that he had built and reassembled it several times, checking off the steps in the article systematically each time, but never could make it work. He banished it to a spot on the bottom shelf of his huge, cluttered workbench in the basement, but the anticipation of reaching a goal, a destination, had infected him with determination, and now he could not stop thinking about the idea of remote control for the television set. He would sit in his favorite chair, watching television, dreaming of a way to control it from where he sat, chewing the bitter cud of failure.
    My father must have been one of the country’s greatest television enthusiasts in those early days. His chair sagged nearly to the floor from the thousands of hours he had spent in it, pursuing his hobby. If the industry had known about his devotion to the medium, its captains would probably have rewarded him somehow. They might have given him a dinner. They might have given him a remote control, if they had one that worked.
    One evening, while he sat there watching and brooding, the thought dawned on my father that he could achieve remote control if he simply removed the essential controls from the cabinet that held the television set, extended the wires that connected them to the rest of the circuitry, and placed them beside his favorite chair, where he could twiddle the dials at a distance from the set itself, remotely. Making the modifications was a tedious task, but not a difficult one, and he accomplished it in a few evenings. He drilled a hole in the floor under the place where the set was positioned and ran the wires through that hole. In the basement, he ran them along the rafters to another hole under the position of his chair and up through that hole to the living room, where he connected them to the controls. To house the controls, he built a handsome pine box that he kept at his side on the table between his chair and my mother’s. He was a contented man.
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    WHAT MY FATHER DID NOT REALIZE, and I did not realize, either, was that some of the projects in IC were impossible to build. Though the magazine emphasized projects that one could, presumably, actually build, it also featured in every issue visionary articles about things that were not buildable yet but might be buildable someday. There was a tension between the here-and-now projects, which had a crudeness about them that made them achievable by the craftsman or hobbyist working in the basement or garage or back yard, and the sleek, seamless devices that were forever just on the horizon, someday to be ours in our bright future of swift transportation, gleaming gadgetry, and easy communication. The visionary articles carried with them an inherent frustration. Always there was at some point, toward the end, after the reader had become convinced that the holographic teleportation device described in the article would probably require no more than an afternoon’s work, the almost casual mention of technical lets and hindrances to its realization, mere details that would “doubtless soon