Rock Around the Jukebox

QUESTION: My husband recently purchased an old jukebox for a game room we created in our basement.  It’s a Wurlitzer 1015, and considering it’s 68 years old, it still plays pretty well. He paid $3,500 for it. Can you tell me more about this machine and others like it? Did my husband get taken on this deal?

ANSWER: While the jukebox is more or less a thing of the past, a few still exist in arcades and road houses off the beaten path and in the private collections of people who yearn for a return to those happy days. The one your husband purchased is the most popular of the oldies but goodies and normally sells for twice that amount.  

A jukebox, for those of you who may not know, is a partially automated music-playing device, usually a coin-operated machine, that plays selections from self-contained media, at first records, then CDs.. The classic jukebox has buttons with letters and numbers that restaurant, diner, and bar patrons pushed  in combination to choose and play a specific selection at first for a 10 cents, then later 25 cents, 50 cents, and upwards.

The earliest jukebox was called a  a "nickel-in-the-slot phonograph," and it came about in the late 1880s. The state-of-the-art invention, engineered by Louis Glass and William S. Arnold of San Francisco, was a coin-operated machine that was a modification of the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison. Upon receiving a coin, unlocked the mechanism, allowing the listener to turn a crank which simultaneously wound the spring motor and placed the reproducer's stylus in the starting groove. Frequently exhibitors would equip many of these machines with listening tubes, similar to acoustic headphones, and array them in "phonograph parlors" allowing the patron to select between multiple records, each played on its own machine. Some machines even contained carousels and other mechanisms for playing multiple records. Most machines were capable of holding only one musical selection, the automation coming from the ability to play that one selection at will. The first of these music players was put at the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco on November 23, 1889. 

The jukebox continued to evolve. Hobart C. Niblack invented a way for the machine to automatically change records in 1918. This led the Automated Musical Instrument Company (AMI) to produce an innovative type of jukebox. Initially playing music recorded on wax cylinders, the shellac 78 rpm record dominated jukeboxes in the early part of the 20th century. 

In 1928, Justus P. Seeburg, who manufactured player pianos, combined an electrostatic loudspeaker with a coin-operated record player and gave the listener a choice of eight records. This Audiophone machine was wide and bulky and had eight separate turntables mounted on a rotating Ferris wheel-like device, allowing patrons to select from eight different records. Later versions of the jukebox included Seeburg's Selectophone, with 10 turntables mounted vertically on a spindle. By maneuvering the tone arm up and down, the customer could select from 10 different records.

Song-popularity counters told the owner of the machine the number of times each record had been played, which allowed the owner to replace less-played songs with more popular ones.

 

The term "jukebox" came into use in the United States around 1940, apparently derived from the familiar usage "juke joint", derived from the word "juke" meaning disorderly, rowdy, or wicked.

Jukeboxes had once been enclosed in wooden cabinets, but by 1937 manufacturers had begun to make them of gaudy plastic, frosted glass, jeweled mirrors, and chrome ornaments. Many of those Art Deco creations were self-contained light shows with polarized revolving disks, bubble tubes, and flashing pilasters. 

In the 1940s, the jukebox started evolving into the version we know today with colorful designs. Manufacturing stopped during World War II, however, as the materials were needed for the war effort. After the war, jukebox manufacturing continued, with the Seeburg Corporation introducing the vinyl record jukebox that used 45 rpm records. 

During those golden years, the Leonardo da Vinci of jukebox design was Wurlitzer's Paul Fuller, who was responsible for 13 full-size machines, five table models, and numerous speakers. The Golden Age of jukebox design ended when he suffered a heart attack in 1944 and died the next year. By then a new generation of larger jukeboxes had appeared, and the classic machines from the golden years—1937 to 1949—were, for the most part, relegated to the junk heap and forgotten. 

 became an important, and profitable, part of any jukebox installation. They enabled restaurant patrons to select tunes from their table or booth. One example is the Seeburg 3W1, introduced in 1949 as companion to the 100-selection Model M100A jukebox. Stereo sound became popular in the early 1960s, and wallboxes of the era came with built-in speakers, enabling patrons to sample this latest technology.

The popularity of jukeboxes extended from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, but they were particularly fashionable in the 1950s. By the middle of the 1940s, three-quarters of the records produced in America went into jukeboxes.

And even with all of today’s high-tech music devices, the sound from one of those old machines was fabulous. Nothing beats hearing an old 78 on a machine created just to play it. Those were the days.

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Punch to Win

QUESTION: My grandfather ran a corner bar. Every afternoon, as men and women would come in from work for a drink before heading home for dinner, he would lay out several punchboards on the bar. For the price of a penny to two bits (25 cents), a player could take a chance to win up to $500. Using a stylus, the player pushed the punch completely through the foil to dislodge a paper message through the back of the board, which the player read, then collected his winnings, but more often than not, discarded in disgust. What can you tell me about these punchboards? Where and when did they originate? And why don’t we play them today?

ANSWER: Punchboards were an early form of lottery game boards used in the 18th century. Though lotteries were as popular back then as they are today, they required a large number of players to be profitable. To enable one or several people to play, a local tavern owner would construct a game board out of wood eight inches square and half an inch thick, then drill small holes in it and fill them with small rolled pieces of paper on which he had written a number. He then covered the holes with paper. After a customer bought a chance at the punchboard, usually for a penny or a nickel, he would puncture one of the hole's paper covers with a nail and retrieve the piece of paper with a number on it. If the number matched those posted, the customer won a cash prize.

As time went on, tavern owners got greedy and realized they could punch the holes with the biggest prizes and keep the money for themselves since they had made the boards. If anyone asked who won the big prize, he would just claim that it was a stranger and put a new board up the next day. Some tavern owners went a step further and didn’t put any winning numbers their boards. Players eventually caught on to this and stopped playing punchboards.

C.A. Brewer and C.C. Scannell of Chicago patented the modern punchboard in 1905.These new punchboards, made of cardboard, had paper covering both the front and back of each hole to help prevent operators from cheating. They came with a metal stylus and became popular purchases at drugstores, bars, and barbershops, much like today’s lottery tickets sold at convenience stores.

Although punchboards had been around for many years, they had never been so available or so portable. Brewer and Scannell created their punchboards so that one customer could play a lottery, with no contribution necessary from anyone else. This enabled the punchboard's owner/operator to sell chances to one customer at a time, and to immediately tell how much he had won, without waiting for all the punchboard numbers to be sold.

The invention of board stuffing machines and ticket folding and plaiting machines in the late 1910s allowed punchboard manufacturers to produce them cheaply. From 1910 to 1915, over 30 million punchboards were sold.

The concept of the punchboard had been around for many years before 1905. Many bar and pool hall owners making their own punchboards, drilling a few holes in a wooden board, then stuffing small pieces of rolled paper into each hole. Unfortunately, the customer only had the punchboard owner’s word that there was a winning number in at least one of the remaining non-punched holes, a fact that often just wasn’t true. Too often the owner/maker of the homemade punchboard would punch out the winning hole for himself, or he wouldn’t even have bothered to put a winning number in any hole. Profits from these homemade punchboards were very high.



Many people soon realized these homemade punchboards were probably fraudulent, thus the popularity of punchboarding declined. It took the invention of punchboard manufacturing machines, which could cover both sides of the board with a sheet of undamaged paper, to convince customers to return to punchboard gambling.

The mass-production of punchboards led to a general standardization of shapes and a standardization of the themes that helped identify different manufacturers' boards. Although most boards were rectangular in shape, their themes were unique. Some of the successful themes featured drawings of shapely pinups, and titles that implied that certain boards offered big payoffs, such as Win u Ruck, Barrel of Winners, and Sweepstakes Parley. Some punchboards had themes featuring racy drawings and titles such as Easy Double, Big Gusher, and Lady Your Fat is Showing.

Some punchboards had as many as 10,000 holes, and some as few as 25. Some paid out prizes instead of money, such as cigarettes, and some guaranteed that everyone was a winner. But they all had one thing in common—their calculated average gross profit or what the board's owner could expect as his profit when he sold all the holes and gave out all the prizes.  Not had, in an era when lunch cost 25 cents and a gallon of gas cost 10.

Punchboard sales declined significantly after WWII, as many states made them illegal.  Many manufacturers attempted to disguise the gambling nature of the boards by stating that prizes were "for trade only" and not redeemable for cash. Cigarette, cigar, and beer companies used punchboards as an advertising medium, featuring packages of cigarettes or bottles of beer as prizes on their punchboards instead of cash. While some of these boards were operated as advertising gimmicks, most were still played for cash.

Despite the millions of punchboards produced, it’s difficult for collectors to find non-punched or unusual punchboards because most were simply thrown away when their original owner felt the board would no longer sucker another coin from an unwitting player.

 prices range from a couple of dollars far a board with dog-eared edges and faded colors, up to several hundred dollars for a non-punched board in pristine condition. As with most collectibles, condition is important in a punch-board's cost. And  some punchhoard themes have remained consistently more desirable, therefore more costly.

Though there have been numerous lottery-type games invented over the years, non fired the imagination o f gamblers and collectors like the punchboard.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 24,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about vintage games in the 2019 Holiday Edition, "Games, Games, and More Games," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.