Muzak is much more than “elevator music.” When it was invented in the early 20th century, Muzak represented a technological marvel—a new way of broadcasting music using a home’s standard electrical wiring.
Muzak’s inventor, Brigadier General George Owen Squier, envisioned a world in which music was the soundtrack of everyday life, broadcast from a small box in every home connected to a global network. Keep in mind, that was 100 years before streaming music.
Born in Dryden, Michigan in 1865, Squier was the first Army officer to earn a doctoral degree (electrical engineering), he held more than 65 patents in wired and wireless communications, and he was instrumental in bringing airplanes into the U.S. military.
“Squier achieved a lot of firsts,” says Mark Harvey, state archivist of Michigan. “He was the first military officer to get a PhD. He was the first passenger on a military flight. He even helped purchase the Army’s first plane from the Wright Brothers.”
Late in life, Squier retired from a highly decorated career in the Army Signal Corps to dedicate himself to his pet project, Muzak.
Squier Invents Multiplexing
Squier wasn’t a musician, but he came of age during a time of exciting breakthroughs in communications technology. In the late 19th century, Squier witnessed the invention of the telephone and the gramophone, and some of the first experiments with wireless radio technology.
After Squier graduated from West Point Military Academy in 1887, he was assigned to an artillery unit at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland. To improve his understanding of ballistics and battlefield communications, Squier studied electrical engineering at nearby Johns Hopkins University.
In 1898, Squier served in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He commanded a ship that laid hundreds of miles of communications cables to connect soldiers on far-flung islands. Squier became convinced that the Army could win wars faster and save lives with improvements in long-distance communications.
At the time, technologies like the telegraph and telephone were limited to transmitting one signal or conversation over a communications cable at a time.
“If one wire could be made to do the work of many wires,” wrote Squier, “the main difficulty in field communications for war purposes would be solved.”
Using his engineering background, Squier developed a system for transmitting multiple signals over the same wire at different frequencies. His patents for “multiplex telegraphy and telephony” were game changers, increasing the capacity of the standard telephone wire by 400 percent and the telegraph wire by 1,000 percent.
Squier’s multiplexing technology was a boon to early telephone companies like the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (AT&T), which Squier later sued for patent infringement.
Broadcasting Radio Over Electrical Lines
Not only was Squier a technological genius, but he was able to imagine novel applications for his technology beyond military communications. In 1910, soon after filing his patents for multiplexing, Squier recorded this idea in his journal:
“Try superimposing wireless telegraphic and telephonic messages upon the ordinary electric light wires in a building or throughout a city. I see no reason why this same wiring, which is now utilized to carry power, should not also serve for telephony by electric waves. This would simplify house wiring for hotels and office buildings, etc.”
Radio at the time was still in its infancy, and broadcast signals were weak and plagued with interference and static. Multiplexing had proven that it was possible to send multiple communications signals over the same telephone or telegraph cable.
Now Squier wondered if radio broadcasts could be transmitted over electrical wires instead of through the air. He called his invention “wired wireless.”
“The far-flung tentacles of the two vast wire networks, telephone wires and electric-light wires, are already side by side in millions of American homes,” wrote Squier. “The people should see to it that these two essential public electric utility channels are required to cooperate promptly in speeding the solution of the difficult and baffling problems of radio broadcasting.”
At the same time Squier was inventing multiplexing and “wired wireless,” he was flying with the Wright Brothers and creating the “aeronautical division” of the Army Signal Corps, the grandfather of the Air Force.
“Squier was interested in so many different things,” says Harvey. “You would think that a West Point graduate would have a military mindset and be pretty narrowly focused, but he was all over the place. And then he turned around and thought up Muzak.”
Muzak Moves from Homes to Businesses
In 1923, Squier retired from the military to dedicate himself full-time to bringing high-quality radio broadcasts—music and news—into the homes of average Americans.
Squier licensed his “wired wireless” technology to a public utility conglomerate called the North American Company, which tested its new service on Staten Island, New York. They called it Wired Radio. Homeowners were given a receiver box that looked like a cross between a radio and a gramophone. Music and news broadcasts were transmitted over the electrical lines and subscribers were charged for the service on their utility bill.
Wired Radio worked great, but Squier’s timing was poor. The system didn’t officially roll out until the early 1930s, and by then it faced stiff competition from commercial radio. In 1934, Squier changed the company’s name to Muzak, a combination of “music” and Kodak, one of the most successful companies of its day. That same year, the first Muzak subscribers in Cleveland, Ohio, paid $1.50 a month for music to be piped into their homes.
Squier passed away in 1936, but Muzak lived on. Struggling to compete with free radio broadcasts, the company pivoted from residential customers to businesses like hotels, restaurants and offices. Muzak hired the era’s top musicians to record popular jazz, swing and classical tracks, including Hall of Fame artists like Fats Waller and Rosemary Clooney.
In the 1940s, long after Squier was gone, Muzak marketed its musical programming as a productivity booster for World War II-era factories and offices. Muzak claimed that its “Stimulus Progression” was a scientifically proven method for motivating workers with 15-minute segments of increasingly energetic background music.
Muzak reached the height of its popularity in the late 1950s and 1960s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower installed the service in the White House, and NASA used Muzak to calm astronauts in training. Muzak stayed in business until 2011, when it was bought by Mood Media, but it remains the most recognizable name in background music.
In 2024, a bronze statue of Squier was dedicated in the his hometown of Dryden, Michigan.
