Happy Birthday Jukebox!
On this day in 1889, someone dropped a coin in the world’s very first jukebox. The pioneering music machine (then called a "nickel-in-the-slot player") resided at the Palais Royale Saloon at 303 Sutter St. in San Francisco. Its father, 44-year-old Louis T. Glass, ran the Pacific Phonograph Co. located down the street and had the crazy idea that a machine that played music on a wax cylinder for a nickel, a kind of public record player, might be fun. Amplifiers hadn’t been invented yet so four music fans would group around the device at once, listening on sets of earphones, similar to a language lab in a library. When Amplifiers come along in 1927 they gave birth to the social curse of putting the wrong song on the jukebox and having the whole establishment look at you funny.Back then, the machine only played one song anyway. You had to change the cylinder every few days.
The name "jukebox" derives from "juke joint" as the device was first marketed as a way to hear music made popular by juke joints and not available on commercial radio: country, blues and jazz. And by bringing "race music" into the public space where it wasn’t really allowed, the jukebox effectively integrated popular music, making the heretofore scatological sounds of black and working class white America part of the American vernacular itself.
The jukebox also gave birth to what we now call "Top 40 radio." The number "40" came from the number of singles a jukebox had space for in the late 50s and early 60s. Radio programmers then created the Top 40 format when they noticed the same songs kept getting played on jukeboxes. Big surprise: The Wurlitzer Bubbler model (pictured above) is considered a dominating icon of early rock n’ roll era. The television show "Happy Days", a nostolgic look back that time, opened with shots of a Seeburg M100C jukebox.
Today jukeboxs are available in CD, mp3 and ipod ready forms, an amazing case of the chicks coming back home to roost. Remember the early days of the ipod when journalists called it "A jukebox in your pocket?" Remember the Musicmatch Jukebox software, the PC forerunner to iTunes and now, the backbone of the Yahoo Music service? How the phrase "celestial jukebox" symbolic for access to dream of all the world’s music available at anytime for a reasonable price. Symbolic of a music lover’s gateway to heaven as the device has been for the last century.
So happy birthday jukebox. We should thank you for a lot more than memories. Your humming presence in the corners of our public lives expanded what we thought music was and by that, what we thought our nation’s culture could be.
We owe you a lot more than a shout of recognition and a whirl around the room. It’s you who made us a simple promise filled with a country’s worth of possibilities: Spin a nickel and watch the world come alive.
(via The Writer’s Almanac).