Happy Birthday Jukebox
From
Jukeboxworks comes the story of this 117th birthday:
The official birthday of the jukebox is the 23rd November, 1889. The day of the first public demonstration of a coin-op phonograph in the Palais Royal restaurant, 303 Sutter Street in San Francisco. The operator was Louis Glass, general manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company on Pine Street two blocks away, and he had together with his business partner William S. Arnold been permitted by the proprietor, Fred Mergenthaler, to demonstrate the nickel-in-the-slot machine in the restaurant. Today Louis Glass alone is often regarded as the inventor of the jukebox concept.
The Jukeboxworks website is just a subset of a much larger (and incredibly researched) site on Juke Boxes which can be found here:
Danish Jukebox Archives
(most of the text is in English)
Trivia: The Rock-O-La brand had nothing to do with Rock and Roll, the person who founded that company was Canadian David C. Rockola
Posted by DaveH at November 26, 2006 10:13 PM