So that's the start of the story - as best as we know right now.

But while AMI was struggling to find its footing, one of their player piano competitors was making their own contributions.

Next time, we see how the jukebox takes SHAPE.

After jettisoning their player piano inventory, AMI managed to turn itself around and fully embraced the new market category.

They would become the first of the Big Four jukebox companies who soldiered the War years and defined a new era in publicly-played music.

What's up with the original release? Why did AMI never offer this revolutionary product more broadly?

Whatever the case, AMI was lucky to have this new product. After many good years, the player piano business collapsed in the Depression and forced them into receivership.

Shortly thereafter, AMI engineers filed a patent for their method of such a device.

By 1930, AMI claimed ownership of the device, which would go down in history as the National Automatic Selective Phonograph - after one of the predecessor companies.

From here, things are a bit murky.

In May 1927, news stories started appearing about the Automatic Selectic Photograph, a device that could play two sides of ten individual records with selection capability.

No company is attributed to it at the time, and it quickly disappears.

The other claimant to the throne was far more committed.

Automatic Musical Instrument (AMI) was the merger of two closely-related companies in its eponymous business.

They were a major supplier of multi-roll player pianos; the company was soon exploring the potential of the phonograph.

But breaking into a new business was always going to be risky - doubly so at the onset of the Depression.

Holcomb & Hoke reportedly lost half a million dollars from its phonograph business. They released a few Electramuse models, yet did not stick it out to see the success of the jukebox.

Electramuse first shows up in June 1927; by the next year it was advertised as a product for the coin-op industry.

It's very classy exterior was even more impressive it had a sign which was backlit - a soon to be increasingly common technique in coin-op machines.

Many of their products were at the edges of the coin-op industry though, so they were plenty familiar with the player instrument business - and presumably the Automatic Entertainer.

They decided to use the Deca-Disc as the basis for this new concept of coin-op phonograph.

Unlike most of the companies who became involved in this nascent market, Holcomb & Hoke had absolutely nothing to do with music.

They were a turn of the century manufacturer who dealt in a variety of products, both coin-op and not. Their big claim to fame was a popcorn-maker.

We still lack some information to definitively say.

However, what is clear is that in 1927, at least two companies started offering multi-selection phonographs with an electric speaker attached.

The first we'll examine is the Electramuse by the company Holcomb & Hoke Mfg.

Among these switching formats was one called Deca-Disc.

As the name implies, it could switch between ten different records with a mechanism far less complicated than that of Gabel.

From these two threads come to origins of the jukebox.

But who did it first?

Another technology starting to flower at this moment was a sophisticated, non-proprietary disc-changer for records.

Such a device was advertised for the home, but it hardly made sense in that context. Far better for a rival of the Gabel-style coin-op player, no?

Part and parcel with this was also the ability to create electrical speakers to harness the new fidelity of that sound.

This is where coin-op machines had an edge: Though people were buying radios for their homes, a tabletop phonograph could only have pretty minuscule speakers.

Up until the mid-1920s, all musical was recorded in the same way: Blowing sound into a microphone directly onto an acetate.

Then came the advent of the electric-powered microphone. Not only did this open up many new possibilities for recording, it also drastically improved sound quality.