ABSTRACT
Already in 1890, frustrated phonograph merchants were turning away from business uses and toward the growing coin-in-the-slot business. Between the erosion of phonography's novelty to coin-in-the-slot users and a bottleneck in the manufacture and distribution of new recordings, the potential of arcade-style listening to support the industry died off in the first decade of the twentieth century. The industry's changing attitude toward marketing the phonograph could perhaps be best illustrated by the shift in content among three major publications, the Phonogram, the Phonoscope, and a second Phonogram. Concurrent changes in middle-class domestic life during this period help set in relief the changes in the shape of phonography. The phonograph's history illustrates this quite well; the varying uses highlighted in the industry literature correspond to changes in middle-class sociability. Any discussion of the phonograph's possibilities would be incomplete without the list of potential applications offered by Edison in an early publication on the potential of the phonograph.
