Today, the ability to listen to music is something we take for granted, and it has been for a little over a century. But for most of human history, you could listen to music only when there was someone around who was able to play it. In other words, most of the time, if you wanted music, you had to make it yourself.

A century ago, the phonograph was already well established. But as this ad shows, most people still remembered what it was like before. The ad appeared in the July 1919 issue of Popular Science.