You could actually just press that "off" button at any time, and the dog would look around and do that funny "Dog shrug" thing they do, and go upstairs and lie down, even if it was the middle of the day. We had, essentially, a remote controlled dog.
I vividly remember when I realized it. One day in class we were watching a tape and the TV was whining the entire time. After the tape was over, the teacher started talking about what we'd seen, but didn't turn the TV off. I asked him to, because the sound was so annoying. A bunch of kids started saying they didn't hear anything, which made me think I was crazy until one other kid stuck up for me and said she heard it too.
In television sets, this high frequency is about 15 kilohertz (15.625 kHz for PAL, 15.734 kHz for NTSC), and vibrations from the transformer core caused by magnetostriction can often be heard as a high-pitched whine. [0]
An elderly lady with several pets called the operator to say that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called; and that when it did ring, her dog usually barked first. The engineer went to investigate.
He climbed a telephone pole next to the house, connected his test set, and rang the line to subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring, but the dog barked loudly. He tried again, now the phone rang.
Climbing down from the pole, the engineer found:
- This was in a country where the ringing was done from one of the wires against ground (not across the pair) (I think it was England).
- A dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar.
- The ground post was in dry, poorly conducting ground.
- The dog was receiving >50 V of ringing voltage when the phone rang.
- With this torturous treatment, the dog would start barking and urinating on the ground.
- The wet ground now completed the circuit and the phone would ring.
OK, this story has a definite "urban legend" ring to it. Mythbusters wouldn't have tested it with a real dog, I guess.
It would be easy enough to test without involving a dog. They've done plenty of electric-shock myths with ballistic gel dummies.
I had built myself a simple modem for packet radio (ham radio; very slow modem for use on shortwave bands), and wanted to test it. However, I was at home, and at the time I used either the HF station I had installed at my office in the university or the one at the radio club down the hill.
Heck, I'd only try some local comms, anyway. I got an old transmitter out of a cabinet and strung up a dipole antenna under the ceiling in the living room. I tied one end to the curtain rack either end of the room, called the radio club, agreed on a frequency, and off I went.
When I keyed the transmitter, I could hear a commotion starting upstairs. It died down, and I didn't think more of it. After a while, new commotion.
Next day, I met the occupant of the apartment above at the mailboxes; she said her cat had acted up last night - running around the living room like it had the devil on its back.
Turned out it had a metal collar, and loved to snooze on the floor right under the window, as the radiator on the wall below the window made it real warm and cozy there.
When I keyed the transmitter, I basically had a very high RF voltage at the end of the antenna - and the cat, whose collar was a mere few centimeters away, got enough of a current induced in it for the cat to go ballistic. Poor thing.
I thought it was pretty cool that she could sit on her chair and change the channel & volume without getting up.
I suspect that if a dog had been involved that cable would have quickly become a tangled mess! (I'm not sure how common "wired remotes" were, that was certainly the only one I ever saw, in the early eighties.)
It was basically a rubber squeeze pump (just like on a blood pressure machine) and a rubber tube connected to the tv. When you squeezed the pump, the pressure in the tube would click the dial forward one notch.
[0] Was this exact one: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/kyIAAOSwz71ZPcLZ/s-l300.jpg
[1] Looked something like this, IIRC: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O2PtM-x0fDc/UyFjySzfuCI/AAAAAAAAJ9...
What does this mean?