San Francisco

IF YOU DISCOUNT his magenta and burnt-orange hair, teased into long curls that dangle down the nape of his neck, Mitch Altman is a modest man, with a diffident manner. He's the sort of person who, if he has to use a cell phone in a public place, turns away and covers his mouth with his free hand, lest he bother someone. His modesty is not only charming and rare but also wholly unjustified. For Mitch is the founder, CEO, and co-owner (with his mom) of Cornfield Electronics, and he has invented the single greatest technological breakthrough of the past three-and-a-half centuries, at least. He has nothing to be modest about.

Mitch's invention is called TV-B-Gone. He carries one on his keychain, as, God willing, you will someday carry one on yours. It fits snugly in the palm, a near-weightless lump of black plastic. Its shape vaguely suggests the Batman logo. A tiny diode rests on the very tip of Batman's head, between his pointy bat ears. Press a button and from this diode a beam of invisible light escapes that can turn off any television--any television--within a radius of 45 feet.

Yes, yes, yes: Imagine the possibilities. You sit in a doctor's waiting room, casting your mind forward to the grisly procedures he has in store for you (you can almost hear the snap of the rubber gloves) and hung high above you in a corner near the ceiling, well out of reach, Maury Povich is interviewing an adulteress, her daughter, and her daughter's transgendered lover, as the studio audience whoops and yelps and stomps its hairy feet. You reach in your pocket and withdraw your key chain. You tilt Batman's head toward the screen: TV-B-Gone! And it's gone!

Or the airline has delayed your flight, again, and all you want is to go home, and as you pace the soulless terminal from one end to the other the voice of Wolf Blitzer trails you like a police siren, roaring out from the CNN television monitors which have been spaced every 10 yards, so you're never out of earshot. The TSA guards may have taken your Swiss Army Knife, but they've left you with your lump of plastic. You point and press. Wolf-B-Gone!

On the phone your girlfriend has whispered the ominous words, "We have to talk." You meet in a neutral bar, amid the ferns and gleaming brass. Yet you can scarcely hear a word she says for the soccer game blaring in Spanish from the inevitable television that no one is watching. Hasta la vista, televisión!

You will want to come up with your own scenarios. "I use mine in the Laundromat a lot," says Mitch, sitting in Cornfield's worldwide headquarters, which are in a one-bedroom walk-up near the corner of Castro and Market streets in San Francisco. Mitch lives nearby, and like many bachelors he spends a lot of time at the Laundromat.

"The TV is always on, whether there's anybody there or not. And really, the last thing you want to see while you're doing your laundry is things blowing up, reports of murders, crime and stuff. Or Dr. Phil." He shudders visibly. "I've never been in there when people are really watching it. They're distracted by it, but that's different. So when I pull out my TV-B-Gone and turn the TV off, they go back to their book, or they talk to each other, or they watch the laundry go round and round and round. Nobody ever gets annoyed."

IT WAS UNDER SIMILARLY PROSAIC CIRCUMSTANCES that the idea for TV-B-Gone came to him. He was having dinner with friends in a neighborhood restaurant. Up in a corner near the ceiling a television screen flickered. The sound was muted, but Mitch and his friends found themselves turning their attention to it anyway--an experience that every citizen of every country wired with electricity has had at one time or another.

"You could just feel this screen suck the energy right out of the conversation," he says. "I thought, 'Gee, I wish I could turn that thing off.'"

A friend was thinking the same thing. "What we need," said his friend, in a burst of inspiration, "is a TV-B-Gone!"

Over the next few years, Mitch worked away at the idea in his spare time. He's an electronics wizard and, at 48, a veteran of many Silicon Valley start-ups. When a company he owned shares in was sold, he took his $80,000 windfall and devoted himself to TV-B-Gone full time.