The
Muzak Makers
-Excerpted
from a 1979 Cleveland Magazine article by Mark Kmetzko-
To many, Muzak is what jazz pianist Thelonious
Monk once called “chewing gum for the brain.”
The bland, laundered music accompanies a hundred million people
around the world in their daily activities—from working
to banking to shopping to waiting while their kids get their
braces adjusted. But do they know that the multimillion-dollar
industry (built around music that people hear but, hopefully,
don’t listen to) cut its teeth some 45 [now 65] years
ago in Lakewood?
Major General George O. Squier, who served in
World War I as Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army, did
not have modern Muzak in mind in 1922 when he conceived of
sending music and news into homes via power lines. Squier
peddled his idea to North American Company, a New York-based
company which owned the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company
at the time. After working out the electronic details, the
company tried out the concept in Lakewood and a few other
cities around the country.
CEI’s substation in Lakewood proved perfect
for the transmission of live music (phonograph records had
not been invented yet) into homes in the western suburbs.
Not long after these first experiments, North American amplified
its Cleveland project into the main source of developments
and established a locally based subsidiary, Muzak Corporation
of Ohio.
Fairview Park resident Walter Thoma still remembers
the early days of Muzak. His parents, who lived on Lake Avenue,
were among the service’s estimated 200 to 300 customers
of the early ‘30s. Thoma recalls that the receiving
unit was a console roughly the size of a twenty-five inch
television set. “The fidelity was nothing to brag about,”
Thoma says, “but that was fifty years ago and a long
way from the audio technology of today.”
Nonetheless, Muzak delivered a lot of entertainment
and novelty for its $8 monthly charge.
But Lakewood’s involvement with in-home
Muzak was short-lived. Between the electrical generators causing
technical difficulties and the advent of commercial radio,
Muzak Corporation of Ohio soon found itself operating at a
financial loss. So after Lakewood (and Cleveland) had helped
realize General Squier’s dream, the company’s
executives moved the business to New York. There, the means
of transmission shifted from power to telephone lines, and
Muzak Corporation scrapped home service in favor of sending
music into hotels and restaurants.
Mazie Adams
Lakewood Historical Society Newsletter 9/2000
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