Mark Harvey of the Michigan History Center joined Stateside to discuss Squier’s career. He said that Squier initially developed elevator music, also known as Muzak, as a novel way of transmitting music directly into homes through electrical wires.
Created by Brigadier General George Owen Squier, Muzak® combined the technology of the wireless radio and cable communications. In 1910, General Squier received multiple patents on “multiplexing,” a communications system that allows multiple conversations on a single pair of telephone wires. His technical innovation in signal communications evolved into today’s fiber optics and cable television’s hundreds of channels.
Real-time transmission of media dates back to the 1920s and George Owen Squier. Among other inventions, Squier patented an approach for sending music long distances without using radio, which was expensive and unreliable at the time. - See more at: http://www.videoedge.net/news/distribution/state-video-streaming-how-did-we-get-here-and-where-are-we-headed/363737#sthash.reo7jNwu.dpuf
Muzak was the brainchild of Major General George Owen Squier, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. Gen. Squier may have been the most celebrated inventor of his day, had it not been for his contemporaries Thomas Edison and Wilber and Orville Wright.
The son of a prominent Dryden farm family, Squier had a colorful career that spanned the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection and World War I. He drew up the first military specifications for an airplane and was to radio what Steve Jobs was to personal computing.
In a growing country that wanted nothing more than to be connected, the great green hope of instant contact lay with Major General George O. Squier's unassuming, super-economical floraphone.
“But Squier was very forward thinking when it came to the airplane’s potential. He saw them doing things that the planes of the day still couldn’t do.”
In 1922, General Squier--incidentally also the first passenger to ride in an airplane with the Wright Brothers and one of the pioneers of the U.S. Signal Corps--had started a company to utilize his patent on telephone carrier multiplexing for the transmission of music.
General George Squier was a military man, a great thinker, an inventor, and a pioneer in both radio and electricity. It’s said that Squier created the county’s first and only privately owned park, which he deemed “A country club for country people” in his hometown of Dryden.
Squier had a colorful career serving in the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection and World War I. He drew up the first military specifications for an airplane and in 1916 organized the Army’s aviation section, which became the U.S. Army Air Corps and then the U.S. Air Force.
The American military's work in creating the Internet can be dated to 1910, when Army officer George Owen Squier (pronounced like "square") invented a way to let a telephone line carry multiple signals at one time. His discovery, multiplexing, paved the way for the development of telephone and data networks; as did his later invention of sending music over electric wires.
It all started in 1934 as a made-up corporate moniker for General George Owen Squier's wired music transmission venture. The -ak bit was a tip of the hat to the made-up-word fame of Kodak. In 1922, General Squier--incidentally also the first passenger to ride in an airplane with the Wright Brothers and one of the pioneers of the U.S. Signal Corps--had started a company to utilize his patent on telephone carrier multiplexing for the transmission of music. The multiplexing process allowed for the transmission of many signals over one wire, and its contribution to networking remains a cornerstone of the Internet.
The guy that invented the technology making piped music possible was George Owen Squier, a Major General in the United States Army signal corps. His invention of multiplexing – sending several analogue signals over a single line – in 1910 paved the way for the company he would start in 1922, Wired Radio, which would eventually be renamed Muzak.
The saga behind the emergence of Muzak began with a former U.S. Army major general, George Owen Squier (1865-1934), a Washington D.C.-based inventor who garnered admiration in scientific circles. Among his innovations was a device that kick-started the development of high-speed telegraphy in the pre-telephone years. Then, while heading the U.S. Signal Corps during World War I, Squier invented a means of transmitting music from phonograph records long-distance via electrical power lines.
For a company whose name is synonymous with wimpy music, Muzak had a surprisingly tough founder: an Army general. Major General George O. Squier served as the Army’s Chief Signal Officer during World War I, and in the early 1920s he perfected a method for transmitting music across electrical wires.
Of course, Major General George Owen Squier, who invented the Muzak concept through his Cleveland-based Wired Radio Inc. back in 1934, had an inkling there was a market to be exploited. Gucci Timepieces & Jewelry recently teamed up with The Recording Academy for a partnership that will entail the GRAMMY Museum analyzing and preserving an archive of more than 20,000 unearthed original Muzak recordings, revealing the company's — and the industry's — impressive, historic legacy.
Squier argued the need for publicly accessible airports, and that both state and federal governments should support this endeavor. According to him, America “needed a chain of them around the whole United States, so that we can fly from the one to the other and circuit this country.”
Although generally unknown to the public today, Squier was world famous during his lifetime. As an Army officer, he was a key figure in the development of the airplane and radio for our national defense. As a scientist, his inventions laid the groundwork for the development of our modern telecommunications systems. As a businessman, he formed a famous radio broadcasting company.
Squier patented his work in 1911 and donated his patents to the American people, allowing anyone to use the technique--although he expected it to have only noncommercial uses, and was upset to see that companies made money by using the technique to allow multiple voice calls over a single wire.