How do you carry your music? You probably have it stored in your mobile phone or use music apps to stream them and listen. If you still don’t have your own smartphone, then you might be using a music player or the radio to listen the songs whenever you want. What if none of these options was possible? What if you had to gather around a device that played music, paying for every time you used the service?
A jukebox is a semi-automated music-playing device popular in the middle of the 20th century. Usually a coin-operated machine, it played a user’s selection from available self-contained media. If the idea doesn’t seem relatable to you, wait till you hear about a nickel-in-the-slot phonograph.
First jukebox
The nickel-in-the-slot phonograph is seen by many as the first jukebox, even though it was never known by that name (the word “jukebox” seems to have originated only after the 1930s). it was first installed on November 23, 1889 in the Palais Royale Saloon, Sutter Street, San Francisco, meaning it appeared nearly four decades before the word “jukebox” started doing the rounds.
Before we look at the nickel-in-the-slot machine, we will have to understand the phonograph. The brainchild of American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison, it was first demonstrated by him in 1877. Even though Edison firmly believed that his phonograph – a device for mechanical recording and reproduction of sound – would be put to use in offices, it was the music industry that benefited most from it.
Phonograph at its core
Among those who made the most of the phonograph were two men, Louis T Glass and William S Arnold. Glass worked with the Pacific Phonograph Company during that time and Arnold was his business associate. Glass was struck with the idea that if he could get people to part with money to listen to music, he might make it big in a new business. He soon got to work along with Arnold, and he proved to be absolutely right about his ideas.
Glass and Arnold came up with the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph, an inventions that placed on Edison Class M electric phonograph inside a wooden cabinet. With loudspeakers yet to be invented, the phonograph was attached to four tubes that looked like stethoscopes that were used to listen to the only song stored in the device.
Glass particularly prided himself in the way in which he had devised these four tubes. Each of these tubes was provided with a slot in which a nickel (coin) could be dropped. While dropping a nickel in any of these slots started the machine and played the song, it was only audible in the tube in which the nickel was dropped. If others tried to listen in with the other tubes, they got no sound, unless they dropped a coin to activate that tube as well.
Once installed at the Palais Royale Saloon, it became evident that it was an instant success. With minimal amounts being spent for regular maintenance, it was clear that Glass and Arnold had struck it rich. To add to that, the machines turned out to be so attractive that places that wanted to be buzzing with people took it on lease on regular rentals, while receiving just a 10th of the actual proceedings.
Makes a lot of money
Six months from the time the first nickel-in-the-slot phonograph got going, on May 14, 1890, it had raked in $1,035.25 1(a lot of money at that time). Other machines that had been placed around the city, including some that were placed in close proximity to each other, also did equally well. This prompted Glass to say “that all the money we have made in the phonograph business we have made out of the-nickel-in-the-slot machine,” when he was invited to speak at the first annual convention of local phonograph companies of the U.S. held in Chicago on May 28 and 29, 1890.
Till the advent of radio, phonograph and the various inventions based on it remained the mass medium for popular music and recordings. It was then followed by jukeboxes that dominated the scene until transistors were invented. They might have gone by a different name, but the predecessor to these jukeboxes started out by accepting just a nickel in the slot.
Picture Credit : Google