Portable record player, Mikiphone,

1924

After the revolutionary invention of the gramophone and the records to go with it, manufacturers focused on the miniaturization of music players. By the mid-twenties, there was already a portable gramophone so small that it could be taken along on a picnic. Still not satisfied, the successful precision industry in the Jura Mountains, in the canton of Vaud—which exported fully assembled gramophones and components in series of hundreds of thousands—strove to develop devices that could be transported in a briefcase or even a trouser pocket. Thorens in Sainte-Croix produced a case with a crackle-painted finish, measuring 5 by 26.6 by 11.5 centimeters, which held the tone arm, pickup cartridge, speakers, and crank. The Paillard company, located in the same town and run by relatives, came out with a rival to this miniature gramophone in the form of the much more compact Mikiphone, which was housed in a hand-size nickel-plated box. The “first pocket gramophone in the world,” fabricated in a series of 180,000 after a patent belonging to the Hungarian Vadàsz brothers, required cumbersome assembly before use. The recording head and a two-piece Bakelite resonator had to be connected to the foldout tone arm before the shellac disc could be placed on the turntable’s central pin. This precision engineering feat was awarded first prize at an international music exhibition in Geneva in 1927. Le Corbusier went so far as to tout the Mikiphone in 1926 as a “prime demonstration of the spirit of a machine age.” (Arthur Rüegg)