The first jukebox: Rhodri Marsden's Interesting Objects No.88

Louis T Glass's "Nickel-In-The-Slot Phonograph" placed an Edison Class M Electric Phonograph into a wooden box and bestowed it with a coin slot

A group of people listen to a jukebox in Salina, Kansas circa 1890 (Getty Images)

The word "jukebox" seems to have originated in late-1930s Florida, but the jukebox concept was born some 40 years earlier on the opposite side of America.

At the age of 44, Louis T Glass, a former telegraph operator and now general manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company, had an interesting idea: what if you could persuade people to part with five cents in return for hearing a song?

The result was the "Nickel-In-The-Slot Phonograph", an invention that placed an Edison Class M Electric Phonograph into a wooden box and bestowed it with a coin slot. Ker-ching!

The first one was installed in the Palais Royale Saloon at 303 Sutter Street, San Francisco, this week in 1889. It was similar to the modern jukebox in some ways (you paid your money, you got your tune) but it was markedly different in others. There was only one wax cylinder inside the box, so your choice of song was limited to… the song currently installed. In addition, loudspeakers hadn't actually been invented by that point, so people had to crowd around and listen on a number of stethoscope-style earpieces. In 2015, that sounds like a monumental drag; in 1889, it proved to be a local sensation.

According to phonograph historian Allen Koenigsberg, the Palais Royale Saloon was gone by the following year, but while the joint may not have been making much money, Louis T Glass certainly was. By the following May, when he and his colleague William Arnold patented the "Coin-Actuated Attachment", there were five machines installed in the local area raking in as much as $1,000 a month. So, not only were Glass & Arnold the inventors of the jukebox; by establishing demand for the public phonograph and the cylinders therein, they effectively kick-started the music business as we know it.

@rhodri