The Multiphone

fig. 1 Shyvers Multiphone (n.d) www.decophobia.com

I found this piece of dead media particularly interesting because of the way personal music players are taken for granted in today's society. People seem to feel it's a god given right to have access to their own choice of music, when just a few years the thought of having a personal selection of music in your hands was ludicrous.


Nowadays you can't go anywhere today without seeing the vast majority of the population with wires hanging out of their ears.

Could you imagine if having access to your own music wasn't as easy?

Enter, the Multiphone. This piece of kit was designed by Kenneth C. Shyvers in 1939 as a way to have access to your own music whilst in food and drink establishments. The Multiphone was set up in cafes, bars and restaurants and gave people the ability to play their own music at their table if they paid the right amount of coins. After the coins were inserted, the Multiphone was connected to a team via a telephone connection, who would manually select the song and play it though the line.
Not as easy as sticking your iphone on shuffle..

Although it is a now obsolete form of media, the Multiphone is an important stepping stone into the personal media players we have today, and even more so into streaming sites such as Spotify and Youtube.
In effect it's the same principle, but rather than paying coins and listening through a telephone line, when you want to listen to a song you don't have readily available, the most common thing to do is to stream the song onto your mobile through a 4G connection.


Author Unknown (n.d.) Shyers Multiphone [online] available at: http://www.dyz.com/phones/multiphone.html [Last accessed 18/11/2014]

Fig. 1 Shyvers Multiphone (n.d) [image online] available at: http://www.decophobia.com/prodimg/shyvers-multiphone-with-bracket-art-deco2(1).jpg [Last accessed 18/11/2014]