He Started by Switching Off the World's TVs, and Became the Maker Movement's Evangelist | 100 People With Ideas
Mitch Altman invented TV-B-Gone, and he was one of the people who pushed the maker movement along in its early days.
Mitch Altman invented TV-B-Gone, and he was one of the people who pushed the maker movement along in its early days.
Mitch Altman is 59. He grew up in San Francisco, his graying hair carries a few streaks of red, yellow and blue, and more than twenty colored bands are wrapped around his left wrist.
The first time his name appeared in Make, the popular maker magazine behind the Maker Faire, he was called the Johnny Appleseed of hackerspaces — the American folk hero who helped open up the West by improving the way apples were grown.
Altman has done nothing much for apple growing. His best-known work is a remote control that can shut off every television in the world with one button: TV-B-Gone. The little thing looks like a car key, with an infrared transmitter inside that can send the power-off signal for almost any brand of TV — in under a minute it can switch off every set nearby. Altman carries one everywhere.
"When the TV is on, the whole world is loud," Altman said. He believes this is an invention full of justice. "Once the TV is off, the world calms down and people feel better. They don't even need to know why," he explained to us.
What made TV-B-Gone famous was CES, the consumer electronics show held in Las Vegas in January 2008. At a show where manufacturers display their newest consumer electronics, televisions are not only one of the main products but also a key tool for showing off everything else. Richard Blakeley, a writer for the tech blog Gizmodo, walked the floor with a TV-B-Gone and switched off the televisions demonstrating new products. His prank was filmed, and the video was watched 679,000 times in a month.
Search for TV-B-Gone on YouTube now and you'll get more than a million results; someone even made a 12-episode series called Attack of the TV-B-Gone (《TV-B-Gone 的攻击》).
That is how Altman became famous in a restless world. The $20 gadget has sold more than 500,000 units.
A maker career that began with giving up television
In the 1990s, Altman, then in his early thirties, made a decision: he would give up television. He had spent too much time in front of a screen since his student days, and he could not wait to fix it. Once he had the idea for TV-B-Gone, Altman recalls, even getting up in the morning became exciting.
Makers feel that kind of excitement often. Plenty of them have worked at big companies like Google or Microsoft and seen the wider world, yet still want to chase their own small ideas — "to free themselves from the big companies." Altman was no different. He had worked earlier at VPL Research on virtual reality (VR), among the first people to try the field. In 1997 he co-founded a company called 3ware, which was later sold for $150 million.
Even so, it took Altman ten years to make up his mind and actually build a TV-B-Gone prototype. That was 2003, and it took nearly two more years of trial and error before he found a contract factory in Shenzhen, China, to start production. It is a simple tool, but Altman had to collect nearly 200 infrared power-off codes covering every television on the market — the same codes that let people control their sets from the couch.
Because the codes are not public, Mitch Altman had to gather remote controls from one TV brand after another, press the power button, record the signal with an algorithm, and load it into TV-B-Gone. Codes vary by brand; they can also repeat or look alike. A Samsung set might have one or two codes, while China's Changhong might have as many as 50. Making sure no code was duplicated and every one of them worked took a long time.
TV-B-Gone in hand, Altman switched off a lot of televisions around San Francisco. "My friends are as weird as I am. They got very excited and wanted one too." Then came the friends of friends of friends. Before Altman himself was in demand, TV-B-Gone had already spread through one odd little circle in San Francisco.
An introverted, odd kid
Apart from those odd friends, Altman was never popular in a crowd. He was introverted, and as a child he took his share of bullying. Most of what he remembers from those years comes from a high school teacher named Roth Coopnick, who taught electronics and encouraged Altman to try out geeky ideas.
Later Altman met the owner of a recording room. Looking back, he calls it "an early prototype of the hackerspace." To get in, you had to promise to show up every Saturday; the younger ones got free guidance from their elders, and everyone talked about what they wanted to build.
In October 2008, Altman and a few friends started a place in San Francisco called Noisebridge. Every week the people known as "makers" gather there to tinker with hardware and software of every kind — a piece of handicraft, an electric skateboard, a wireless speaker. The whole process of making can be filed, crudely, under DIY, upgraded.
Because Altman argued for them, places like this came to share one name: the hackerspace. Altman takes care to explain that a noise bridge is a piece of test equipment used in radio work, and that the "noise" in the name comes from that device — it means equal energy across the spectrum. Put into a hackerspace, the word means makers can see what they did at Noisebridge, and what they did is what they get.
These hackerspaces provide physical space and tools — CNC machines, 3D printers and more — that members can use to turn their ideas into things. Some hackerspaces, TechShop in the US among them, charge members extra for the tools as a way of finding a business model that makes money.
After Noisebridge, preaching the maker movement became Altman's main job.
An evangelist for the maker movement
Altman especially likes to show off a map of hackerspaces, and he calls 2007 an important moment in the history of the maker movement. That year, at Chaos Camp, the outdoor maker gathering the Chaos Communication Club (32 years old today) holds in Germany, talks by three makers inspired Altman, and he went home and began setting up a hackerspace. He was only one of the makers who left inspired.
Before that, hackerspaces as such were rare — fewer than 40, most of them in Germany. Today the number is well past 2,000.
Altman wants the movement to reach further. He co-published a free little book — the open-source comic Soldering is Easy (free to download). It has been translated online into more than 30 languages, and the simplified Chinese version was done by a co-founder of Xinchejian, a hackerspace in Shanghai. Lately this maker, who started out switching screens off, has also been making maker tutorials and uploading them to YouTube.
Silvia Lindtner, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, has studied makers in China for years. Since first meeting Altman at the Beijing Maker Carnival in 2008, she has found that she runs into this eager maker evangelist at maker events all over China. She says Mitch Altman has had a large influence on how China's maker movement developed, and is one of its central forces.
In 2003, Altman came to Shenzhen looking for a factory to build TV-B-Gone. After that he came to China for a month every year, walking around the factory districts and calling on people interested in technology.
After 2009, Altman started bringing other makers from abroad to tour Chinese factories, share the idea of the hackerspace and run workshops. Because he got in early, what Altman saw in China amounts to a record of how the country's maker movement started and grew — including the makers who heard his story and went off to start hackerspaces of their own.
If in the US the word "maker" mostly means a hobbyist who pours energy into something out of interest, in China it has come to mean a hardware entrepreneur. Altman has found that entrepreneurs are especially thick on the ground in China's hackerspaces.
"In China everyone now says make as much money as you can, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that," Altman said at a maker forum held in Suzhou on October 30. "But it's better if you do what you love and make money along the way."
Altman does have his principles. He was working on virtual reality more than twenty years ago, but when VPL, the VR company he was part of, began working with the US Department of Defense, he left.
The same thing happened with Maker Faire, the largest maker show in the world. Altman was an early supporter of Maker Faire and of Make magazine, the force behind it. But when Maker Faire partnered with the US Department of Defense in 2012, he broke with it publicly.
Next to today's tech companies chasing government contracts, Altman looks more like an idealist who is living 50 years ago.
In recent years Altman has spent most of his time traveling. Maker conferences are held all over the world, and nearly everyone wants to invite him. As he said this, Altman rolled up his left sleeve and lifted an arm covered in bands, printed with names like Chaos Communication Clubs, Chaos Camp, Maker Faire…
Cover image from: Wikipedia
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.