Since we seem to be going through a favourites list phase at the moment, I was wondering what everyone’s favourite small invention might be? Not the wheel, or radio, or antibiotics, just everyday things we usually take for granted. For example, I am extremely grateful for the mute button on my remote. I still watch some of our horrible overcommercialised FTA for news and other things and the ability to flick off invasive screaming commercials is essential to my mental health.

According to an article in the Guardian, the mute button was invented in 1956  by Robert Adler, an Austrian-born engineer working for the Zenith Radio Corporation in Chicago. It was one of the four buttons on his Space Command 400, the first commercially viable TV remote control (…) Adler’s boss, Eugene F McDonald, a former naval intelligence officer who was nicknamed “The Commander”, had insisted on mute.

“He hated commercials,” Adler recalled in 1987. McDonald feared these constant intrusions would kill the new medium of TV. So Zenith boasted that the mute button would allow viewers to “shut off the sound of long, annoying commercials”. 

Amen to that. McDonald was wrong about commercials killing off TV, though. They just made it really, really, really stupid.