When the Tappmeyer family moved from their four-year stay in the barn’s granary
to their beautiful new house, they must have wanted to celebrate, perhaps with
music. If so, they and their friends made it themselves, singing and playing
instruments. A couple of decades later, they might have strolled into the parlor,
turned the crank, and listened to opera, classical, blues, or pop. The age of the
phonograph had arrived.

But, first, there was the “talking machine,” accidentally invented when Thomas
Edison inadvertently taped his voice as he was demonstrating his new invention, the
telephone. He knew immediately that this technology would be popular and that it
was perfect for music, but its first use was recording voices: jokes, monologues,
songs. These sounds were captured on wax cylinders and played in coin-operated
talking machine parlors. A patron would drop a coin into the machine, then listen to
a few minutes of recorded sound and do it again and again. The machines were so
popular that they paid a month’s rent in three days’ time. One on Olive Street in
downtown St. Louis welcomed 10,000 visitors on a single Saturday.

Naturally, these parlors made people want a talking machine of their own, so
companies began making home machines and calling them phonographs. Ministers,
often wary of new inventions, embraced them because they recorded sermons and
hymns for parishioners to listen to if they couldn’t get to church. In Missouri, at
least one church arranged for all the people on a party line to pick up the phone
while the person with the phonograph played the sermon and hymns.

Soon, though, just as Edison predicted, music ruled the phonograph world and
changed the way we listen to music. Before, people made music themselves or went
to a place to hear others perform. Now, they could listen to whatever music they
wanted, whenever they wanted, as often as they wanted. There was, however, a
problem: the shellac discs which had replaced the wax cylinders could hold only
three minutes of recorded sound. Hour-long symphonies had to be cut to three
minutes or a collection of three-minute movements. When Stravinsky wrote
Seranade in A in 1925, he created each movement to fit a three-minute side of a disc,
ending with four movements on two discs.

Record companies promoted music many people had never heard – opera, jazz, and
the blues joined popular songs and became popular themselves.

People clamored for their own phonograph and companies eagerly complied,
combining the phonograph made by one company with the case made by another.
Then Brunswick, the maker of our phonograph, upended the market.

John Moses Brunswick immigrated to the US from Switzerland at 14, apprenticed to
a wagon maker, opened his own shop, and quickly diversified making also billiard
tables and the balls and pins for bowling, both commonly found in taverns. He
recognized that the impending Prohibition would end tavern life and that he needed
a new product. Noticing the popularity of phonographs, he first made cabinets for
other companies but quickly realized that if he controlled the entire process, he
could make much more money, so he had a contest for his employees to develop the
components. When he was satisfied, he offered his own phonograph in his own
cabinet, selling it for $150, 40% less than comparable models.

Soon he was offering a variety of models ranging from $125 to $320, ten percent
down and easy payments. Our phonograph, donated by Doug and Barbara
Meadows, is a Brunswick model 120, selling for $295 in 1921. Designed to fit
comfortably in a parlor, it has elegant lines, a front grille, vertical drawers for record
storage, a lid, a crank, and two needle cups. Because the Brunswick played all
records, not just their own, people needed a lot of needles. Many records required
specific needles to play. Additionally, because the manual machines did not have
volume control, Brunswick provided needles that would provide soft, medium, or
loud sound.

Manual phonographs evolved into electric ones, then transistor and battery-
operated ones, and now many people get their music from on-line streaming
services. The music world has come a long way since the first scratchy records, but
one thing of that era remains: the three-minute pop song, a legacy of those long-
forgotten wax cones and shellac discs.