The first jukebox is installed at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It becomes an overnight sensation, and its popularity spreads around the world.
The Pacific Phonograph Company constructed the device around an Edison Class M phonograph, which was driven by electric batteries and played cylinder recordings. (Emile Berliner—see here—was still perfecting the disk record that would eventually sweep away the Edison cylinders.)
The jukebox phonograph itself was fitted inside an oak cabinet to which were attached four stethoscope-like tubes. (The batteries provided motive power only, not amplification.) The listening tubes operated individually, each activated by the insertion of a nickel, meaning that four different paying customers could hear the same song simultaneously. Towels were on hand, so a patron could hygienically wipe off the end of the tube before and after each song.
Louis Glass and William S. Arnold, the entrepreneurs who installed the new invention at the Palais Royale, originally marketed it as the nickel-in-the-slot player. (A nickel then had the buying power of about $1.20 today.) Glass and Arnold received a patent for their “coin-actuated attachment for phonographs” on May 27, 1890. The success of the jukebox eventually spelled the end of the player piano, then the most common way of pounding out popular music to a line of thirsty barflies.
But the automatic coin-operated phonograph did not come to be known as the jukebox until the 1930s; it picked up the name in the southern United States. The etymology of the word, though, remains a bit vague. It may derive from juke house, a slang reference to a bawdy house, where music was certainly not unknown.—TL