“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” – Malala Yousafzai
The mute button was invented by an engineer in 1955 (Polley by name) who worked for Zenith… Although a man named Robert Adler, who invented the television remote, should also be mentioned… i.e. No remote, no mute button. Anyway, they both did us a favor. MUTE on the television means that one can temporarily stop the sound emitted from the television. One would guess that which one mutes, would be the myriad of commercials that we would otherwise sit through to watch just one tv program.
Ah, silence! It has always been my friend; so, when my family bought a television set that had this wonderful mute button, it was heaven for me. One minute some woman is vomiting her vocabulary about her painful twenty-eight day cycle and the next, I have muted her! No more discussion. And, let us not forget the many commercial moments about medicine… Twenty seconds of medical description followed by forty seconds of horrifying disclaimers, as to how this health providing med might also maim or kill the consumer. MUTE! How glorious thou art!
In the course of one TV program, there can be as many as six commercials per commercial break. My parents would hit the mute button and then proceed to read or do cross word puzzles,