IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 200

The first machine to sell music by the hearing was not called a jukebox, and nobody standing nearby could hear it. On 23 November 1889, Louis Glass and William S. Arnold, two businessmen working in San Francisco, installed a coin-operated phonograph in a saloon called the Palais Royale.

The apparatus was an ordinary cylinder phonograph inside a wooden cabinet, with four listening tubes leading out of it. A customer put a coin in the slot, picked up one of the tubes and heard a short recording through it alone. The idea spread quickly, and within a year the pair had installed similar machines in hotels and stations along the west coast.

The technology of the period set narrow limits on what such machines could do. A wax cylinder held only two or three minutes of sound, and every playing wore the groove a little smoother, so that a favourite recording grew faint with use. Owners therefore needed a constant supply of new cylinders, and these were sold not to the public but to the operators of the machines. In this way the coin-operated phonograph created the first market in which recorded music itself, rather than the sale of printed scores or live performance, paid for the making of more recordings.

Flat discs changed the economics. Emile Berliner, a German-born inventor who had settled in the United States, had been developing a different system: the sound was recorded sideways into the groove of a disc rather than up and down into a cylinder. A single master could be used to press thousands of copies in shellac, a brittle compound of resin and filler, and the copies were far easier to stack and store than cylinders. Discs also settled at a standard speed of about 78 revolutions per minute, and by the 1920s the 78 had displaced the cylinder almost completely.

Machines followed that could change records without help. From 1906 the Chicago manufacturer John Gabel was advertising an 'Automatic Entertainer', a cabinet that held a stock of discs and changed them automatically, and rival firms produced similar equipment. Such machines were expensive, and they were found mainly in places where a large number of customers passed every day. They also needed someone to collect the coins and keep the mechanism working, and they were heavy enough to require a firm floor.

The name arrived later. In the coastal regions of the southern United States, a small roadside bar with music and dancing was known as a juke joint, a term that appears to come from a Gullah word meaning disorderly or rowdy. By the 1930s the machines had become a familiar sight in such places, and the phrase 'juke box' was in use to describe them. The word has proved durable: it survives in the language even though the joints that gave it their name have mostly gone.

As the machines became a feature of bars and diners, manufacturers began to treat them as furniture. Cabinets acquired mirror glass, chrome trim and tubes of coloured light, so that a jukebox could be seen across a crowded room. The best known is the Wurlitzer 1015, introduced in 1946 and designed by Paul Fuller, whose rounded shape and rising bubbles of light earned it the nickname 'the bubbler'. Tens of thousands were built. David Rockola, a Chicago businessman who had made his name in weighing scales and coin-operated games, sold a series of rivals under the name Rock-Ola, and Seeburg and AMI competed for the same market.

A change in the record itself gave the machines a second life. In 1949 the RCA Victor company launched a small disc, which turned at 45 revolutions per minute and was pressed in vinyl rather than shellac. Vinyl was light and did not shatter, and the new record had a wide hole in the centre that a changer could grip. The rival Columbia company chose a different path, issuing long-playing records of twelve inches for listening at home. Jukebox operators, who needed cheap single tunes that a customer would play again and again, settled on the 45, and the seven-inch single became the standard currency of popular music.

In the 1950s the jukebox was where a great deal of new music was first heard. A record chosen repeatedly in bars and diners could become a hit without much radio play. The machines also attracted regulation, and many American cities and states required an annual licence for each one. From the late 1950s, however, the jukebox began to lose ground. The transistor radio made music portable and free at the point of use, television kept people at home, and the domestic record player allowed anyone to own the same recordings that the machines carried.

The machine did not disappear. In the late 1980s compact discs replaced records inside jukeboxes, and around the year 2000 manufacturers began connecting their machines to the internet, so that a bar could offer a catalogue of millions of tracks without keeping a single disc on the premises. At the same time the revival of interest in vinyl has created a market for restored machines that play only 45s, and one American firm still builds new jukeboxes of the traditional kind. The cabinet that once stood in the corner of a diner has become an object worth restoring for its own sake.

Ordinary window glass is a passive material. It admits light and heat in whatever quantities the weather supplies, and the only way to alter that is to hang something in front of it. Since the 1980s, however, several kinds of glazing have been developed that can change their optical properties on demand. They are known collectively as switchable, dynamic or smart glazing. The three most established are electrochromic glass, which darkens when a small voltage is applied; polymer-dispersed liquid crystals; and suspended-particle devices. All three draw very little power, which is one of their attractions, but all three need wiring, which is one reason why other approaches have also been explored.

Electrochromic glazing is the type most often installed in buildings. A pane is built as a stack of five or more extremely thin layers sandwiched between two sheets of glass, and the active layer is a film of tungsten oxide. When a voltage of one to three volts is applied, lithium ions held in a counter-electrode travel through an ion-conducting layer into the tungsten oxide, and the film begins to absorb more visible light, so the pane darkens. Reversing the voltage drives the ions back and the glass brightens again. Because the ions stay where they are when the circuit is opened, the pane keeps whatever state it was left in, drawing current only while it is changing.

In polymer-dispersed liquid crystal glazing the mechanism is optical rather than chemical. Tiny droplets of liquid crystal are dispersed through a solid polymer film held between two transparent electrodes. With no voltage applied, the molecules inside each droplet point in random directions, and the boundaries between droplets and polymer scatter light in every direction, so the pane looks milky white. Apply a voltage and the molecules line up, light passes straight through and the glass turns clear. Liquid crystals do not block heat or much visible light, however, so the technology is installed mainly where privacy matters: consulting rooms, office partitions and the glass walls of meeting rooms.

A third design uses particles instead of crystals. In a suspended-particle device, needle-shaped particles a few nanometres long are suspended in a liquid between two transparent electrodes. Left alone, the particles lie at random and the device looks dark. Apply a voltage and they align with the field, letting light through. The change takes only a few seconds, far faster than in an electrochromic pane, but the device needs a continuous supply of power to stay clear, which has so far restricted it to car roofs and similar small applications.

Not all switchable glazing needs wiring. A thermochromic coating contains a material whose crystal structure alters at a particular temperature. Vanadium dioxide is the most studied example; in bulk it changes at about 68 °C, far too hot for a window, and researchers have brought the transition down by adding other elements to the material. A warm coating reflects infrared radiation, while a cool one lets it through. Because no wiring or controls are required, installation is cheap, but the user has no influence at all over what the glass does.

Photochromic glass works on a different principle and has been available for decades in sunglasses that darken outdoors. Silver halide crystals, or the organic dyes used in some modern lenses, change shape when ultraviolet light strikes them and absorb more of the visible spectrum; when the light fades they revert. The effect has been tried in building windows, but it responds to brightness rather than to heat. A window may therefore darken on a cold, bright morning when the sun's warmth would be welcome, and the occupant cannot override it.

The case for switchable glazing is strongest in heavily glazed buildings. Blinds and curtains exclude the view along with the glare, whereas a pane that changes its own properties keeps the view clear. An electrochromic window can be set to admit daylight while limiting the solar heat that enters, which reduces the load on air conditioning, and because the amount of daylight can be adjusted, occupants can tune a room to their taste. Simulations of office buildings in hot climates suggest worthwhile savings in cooling energy, though the size of the saving depends on orientation, climate and, above all, on how the occupants use the glass.

Cost is the main obstacle. A switchable pane can cost several times as much as ordinary glazing of the same size, and the wiring and control electronics add more, so payback periods are long. Climate complicates the calculation: in a cold country solar radiation is a free source of heat in winter, and glass that automatically blocks it may raise heating bills instead of lowering them. Switching speed is a further constraint, since a large electrochromic pane may take several minutes to change and therefore responds slowly to a passing cloud. Occupants given manual controls sometimes leave the glass in one state all day, which defeats the purpose.

Research now concentrates on separating the two things that glass does with sunlight: admitting light and admitting heat. A pane that let daylight in while reflecting infrared radiation would be useful in almost every climate. So-called dual-band electrochromic devices, which use composite materials to control the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum independently, have been demonstrated in laboratories but are some years from production. Other groups are working on solid-state devices that avoid liquid electrolytes, on cheaper manufacturing by printing, and on glazing that generates enough electricity from sunlight to power its own switching.

Barely a month passes without a report announcing the death of the high street, and the culprit is nearly always the same. Shoppers, we are told, have moved online; the shops that remain are showrooms for goods bought elsewhere; and the remedy is a 'digital high street' of apps, wi-fi and QR codes. I find this account unsatisfactory. It identifies a real change but misplaces the cause, and the remedy that follows from it is usually a slogan in search of a policy.

The change itself is not in doubt. In Britain the share of retail spending that takes place online rose from a few per cent in the mid-2000s to roughly a quarter, and the pandemic pushed it higher still. Yet the figure conceals as much as it reveals, because the shift has been very uneven. Books, music and electronics went online early; food, furniture and clothing followed more slowly; and some categories of goods have hardly moved at all.

Nor did the trouble begin with the internet. From the 1970s, planning policy and cheap land encouraged supermarkets and retail parks on the edge of towns, reachable only by car. Rents and business rates were set on the assumption that sales would keep rising. Above all, ownership of the shops themselves became concentrated in a small number of national chains, so that decisions about a particular town were taken in a head office hundreds of miles away. When the chain Woolworths closed in 2008 and 2009, it left empty premises in hundreds of towns, and no local campaign could prevent it.

The internet therefore arrived on a high street that had already been weakened. It would be a mistake to suppose that the internet alone explains what has happened, and a still greater mistake to imagine that switching it off would restore the town centres of 1970.

What, then, of the digital remedies? Free wi-fi in a market square, an app listing independent shops, a scheme to let customers collect online orders from a local store: none of these is worthless, but I have yet to see a convincing evaluation showing that any of them has reversed a decline. Most town-specific apps fail for a simple reason of scale. A town of a hundred thousand people cannot pay for the engineering, marketing and maintenance that a national service spreads across millions of users.

Technology does offer something, but it is narrower than the slogans suggest. Click-and-collect brings people into shops they might otherwise never enter, and they often buy something else while they are there. Local delivery services let small shops serve customers who cannot easily travel. Booking systems keep appointments with hairdressers, repairers and tutors filled. The common thread is that these are services rather than goods. A haircut, a cup of coffee, a bicycle repair and a dance class cannot be packed into a van and shipped from a warehouse.

There is also a danger that the digital high street quietly excludes people. Cashless parking, discounts available only inside an app and menus reached by scanning a code all assume a charged phone, a data connection and the confidence to use both. Those least likely to have them are older residents and people on low incomes, the very people for whom a local shop matters most. A public space that can be entered only by those who hold an account is not really public at all. Convenience for the majority is not a justification for shutting out the rest.

The opposing argument deserves a hearing. Some economists would say that a high street is simply a market in land and buildings, and that if demand for shops has fallen, rents should fall until new uses appear. There is force in this. In places where demand has collapsed, rents do eventually fall, and buildings do find other uses. But the built environment changes slowly, since a street of shops cannot be rebuilt quickly, and the process works far better in prosperous places than in poor ones, so that towns diverge.

My conclusion is that technology is neither the villain of this story nor its rescue. What matters is ownership and the terms on which technology is used. If the systems through which local trade now passes are owned elsewhere, and the data they generate flow out of the town, a place receives the costs of the digital economy and very little of the value. The practical tasks are unglamorous: rents and rates that reflect what a shop actually takes; platforms that any local business can join, rather than one proprietary app; and a guarantee that cash and a human being remain available. Preserving the high street exactly as it was is neither possible nor desirable. But a town centre is more than a collection of shops: it is where people meet, wait, celebrate and do business, and none of that appears in retail figures. The high street will not be saved by an app. It could, however, be lost by one.