THE SHYVERS MULTIPHONE

The Multiphone was invented in the late 1930s by the man who also invented pinball machines. His company flourished in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton (Washington State) area during the 1940s and 1950s. He started a large manufacturing plant in Chicago and made all of the system components. At the height of popularity, there were 8,000 Multiphones installed in restaurants, drive-ins, and bars. Each restaurant booth would have a Multiphone unit on the table, and counters had units spaced along them.

Here is how the system worked: To play one or more records, you would insert the correct number of coins into the coin mechanism at the top of the unit. The two lights on the unit would light up, and through an interconnected telephone line, summoned the attention of a girl disc jockey in the central studio in downtown Seattle. She talked to you directly through a small speaker in the top of the unit, and asked for your record selection numbers. Click on the picture for a large detail.

Songs were ordered "by number", chosen from the cylindrical record list which could be rotated to see all of the several hundred selections. A caption down the side of the list also advertised a special offer - 6 records for 5 nickels! Your selections were played directly to you over the rented telephone lines. Music came out a 4-inch speaker inside the lower section of the Multiphone.