Today, 100 years after the jukebox was invented, the jukebox lives on as a symbol to people of a lost era, of a grander and more romantic period in America, before the advent of generic fast food, personal stereos and computerized music in doctors' waiting rooms. The real brain behind the jukebox was Thomas Edison. Back in 1877 in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, he shouted the immortal words 'Mary had a little lamb' into a hand-cranked dictaphone that made scretches in a wax foil-covered cylinder. He rewound it, and much to his own surprise, heard the nursery rhyme faintly but quite clearly repeated. Twelwe years later, Louis Glass, owner of San Francisco Palais Royale saloon, realized the musical and material potential of Edison's dictaphone. He attached 'listening tubes' and a coin mechanism to an Edison production that played a prerecorded song, and on November 23, 1889, introduced what most agree to be the world's first jukebox. Glass' idea caught on like wildfire. People loved listening to recorded music, and while most people back in the Victorian era couldn't afford $200 phonograph for themselves, they could afford to drop nickles into an 'automatic phonograph' or a 'nickleodeon'. In 1906, the John Gabel Company created the Gabel Automatic Entertainer, which some call the first 'true' jukebox. The Automatic Entertainer played 10-inch discs instead of wax foil cylinders, and featured a multi-selection mechanism that one could watch in operation through a window in the cabinet. It blasted the music through a forty-inch horn. Though the automatic phonograph was no longer a novelty by the 1920s, during the Roaring Twenties, manufacturers started making and selling jukeboxes like never before. The Automatic Music Company invented the electrical amplifier in 1927 and sold 50000 machines in a year. The automatic phonograph had come of age. Now all it needed was a proper name. People started calling the machines jukeboxes sometime in 1930s. It is likely that the term came from the 'jook' joints, places to 'jook' or dance, in the old South where people danced to the music played by the automatic phonographs. But just as jukeboxes were getting more and more glamorous, in 1941 the US government declared war and ordered a halt in jukebox production. Makers offered final 'victory models' and then stopped production entirely until 1946. The return to production saw the industry's all-time best- seller, the 'Wurlitzer 1015'. This model, with its shiny, nickel-coated casting and glowing tubes that bubbled in reds and greens and yellows, probably inspires the most nostalgia for people who grew up listening to Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and Chubby Checker on the jukebox at the local soda shop. The modern era of the jukebox really began in 1950s. Seeburg, one of the four big producers, came out with the first hi-fi model in 1953, and produced a revolutionary machine that could play 200 selections in 1955. But radio and television came along, technology improved and record players became affordable. Jukebox makers began to produce a different style of machine in which the disc-playing mechanism was hidden from view. The magic begun to fade. Today's jukeboxes can play compact discs and even music videos. Nevertheless, people still prefer history to high-tech, and search high and low to find machines that are at least thirty years old. There are as many jukebox 'antiques' in private homes of collectors as there are new 'working' ones in public establishments. One avid collector says his fifty jukeboxes are 'time machines, for they and the music can take you back and give you a glimpse os something totally buried and forgotten and make it all seem real again.' Maybe Elvis lives after all !!  IVANHOE/POLARIS