Forty-five years before the word "Jukebox" was first coined, the world's first "nickel-in-the-slot phonograph" (later abbreviated to nickelodeon) was demonstrated to a small group of patrons at the Palais Royale restaurant on San Francisco's Sutler Street by its creator Louis Glass (1845-1924), General Manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company.
Glass attached a coin mechanism designed to accept nickels to an Edison Class M electric cylinder phonograph housed in an oak cabinet. With amplification still waiting to be discovered, prerecorded music from a single tin foil and wax cylinder was transmitted to a group of four people via listening tubes resembling stethoscopes held to their ears. Towels were supplied to wipe patrons' sweat from their earpiece.
Only a single cylinder could be played at any one time. This limitation nevertheless failed to dent the new machine's popularity, which went on to earn more than $1,000 in its first six months of service, Glass's nickelodeons were soon installed in public saloons and in the waiting rooms of several San Francisco-Oakland Bay ferry services. The advent of the "nickel-in-the-slot phonograph" also brought to an end the dominance of the player piano, which until 1889 had been the most popular method of playing music to large groups of people.
By the 191 Os, the cylinder was gradually superseded by the gramophone record. The shellac 78-rpm record dominated jukeboxes until the introduction of45-rpm vinyl record juke boxes in the 1950s. The 45-rpm jukebox became the standard for years to come.
