When I was about fifteen years old, my brother Willie came home from taking produce to the shore. He was telling us about a machine he had seen along the Boardwalk that could talk, sing and play music. I thought that could not be possible; some one must have been under or behind this thing or perhaps he was a ventriloquist and fooled the boys.
That same fall, at the Egg Harbor Fair, there was a man with a similar contraption with a hose and a lot of earphones attached, mounted on a packing box covered by a cloth, where for a nickel you could hear music or someone singing, if you put one of those tubes in your ear.
There were always plenty of fakers at county fairs, and folks paid little attention to him. They made him take the cloth off of that box and turn it with the open side to the front, but were still suspicious. Then he asked someone to sing a song so he could make a record. Well, they got Adolph Mueller to do that, and when the operator played the song Mr. Mueller had sung, everyone was anxious to listen, and the folks saw it was no fake.
Soon thereafter, Joe Hittinger purchased a machine, one with cylinder records and a large horn and gave an exhibition at the Aurora Hall.
Not many years passed before phonographs became popular and after about 1912 there was one in nearly every home. These were the disc style without the horn.