Aesthetic Style

The first jukeboxes were simply wooden boxes with coin slots and a few buttons. Over time they became more and more decorated, using colour lights, rotating lights, chrome, bubble tubes, ceiling lamps, and other visual gimmicks. Many consider the 1940s to be the "golden age" of jukebox styling with the gothic-like curvaceous "electric rainbow cathedral" look. World War II and the Great Depression were over, so the new designs and sales choices reflected the festive mood. Even before that, decorative jukeboxes were often one of the few escapes from the problems of the Great Depression and war.

Styling progressed from the plain wooden boxes in the early thirties to beautiful light shows with marblized plastic and colour animation in the Wurlitzer 850 Peacock of 1943. But after the United States entered the war, metal and plastic were needed for the war effort. Jukebox production was cut back. The 1943 Wurlitzer 950 featured wooden coin chutes to save on metal. It should also be noted that since the mechanisms were made of metal, they were not produced during this time, rather, a new cabinet was produced and the internal components of the jukebox were placed into it. Since many of the mechanisms were built by hand, a lot of these jukeboxes had parts that never fit properly and required modification. The 1943 Wurlitzer Victory cabinet featured glass light up panels instead of plastic. After the war, material was available again and there was a big boom in jukeboxes.

The Wurlitzer model "1015-Bubbler" typifies the look and is arguably the most popular jukebox design of all time. Many of these survived into the ‘50s in active use and are instead associated with the ‘50s in pop culture despite their ‘40s origin because of their unique visual prominence and production volume. Designed by stylist Paul Fuller, it is rumoured that when entertainment equipment factories were redirected toward the war effort, Paul had more time to focus on aesthetic design. This extra time resulted in one of the greatest designs in iconic pop culture.

After the '40s, the styles generally became more box-like and "high-tech" in look, distancing themselves from "classic" influences such as ancient Greek, renaissance, and gothic motifs found in the '40s models.

Also, the post-'40s models needed more panel space for the increased number of record titles they could present on selection buttons, reducing the space available for decoration. This is partly due to improved record storage and dispatching technology and partly due to the transition from the 78-rpm disks to the 45-rpm disks, which were more compact.

Jukeboxes from the 1940s are called Golden Age because of the yellow catalin plastic. Jukeboxes from the 1950s are called Silver Age because of the predominant chrome styling. With the rise of fast food restaurants in the 1960s, restaurants wanted to get customers in and out fast, not keep them there, so jukeboxes became less decorative. Record-changing mechanism covered up, they resembled cigarette machines.

Video Disc Jukebox - 1941

This is a jukebox from 1941 that played a stack of Videodiscs and was the television equivalent of a Wurlitzer Jukebox. The image was seen through the aperture at the top, and the sound recorded on the discs came out the large round speaker at the bottom. A stack of 10" Videodiscs can be seen at the left side of the large opening in the middle, with any one of the discs being selectable using the row of buttons underneath the opening. The grooved discs rotated at 100 RPM and provided about a minute of playback. This system appeared in the December 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics, so the advent of World War II halted any commercial implementation of the Videodisc jukebox. Manufacture of televisions was also halted during the war.