Loud Speaker

Gin, brandy, Cointreau, and lemon — named for the era's transformative technology, GE's 1925 loudspeaker enabling KDKA Pittsburgh to broadcast jazz into homes.

The Loud Speaker is a Jazz Age cocktail that takes its name from one of the era's most transformative technologies. The loudspeaker — an electromechanical transducer converting electrical signals into audible sound — was developed commercially in the early 1920s by engineers including Chester Rice and Edward Kellogg at General Electric, whose 1925 paper describing the direct-radiator moving-coil loudspeaker established the design principles that dominated speaker technology for the rest of the century. The technology's commercial deployment coincided with the rapid growth of broadcast radio: KDKA in Pittsburgh, which began broadcasting on November 2, 1920, is recognized as the first commercial radio station in the United States, and by 1922 hundreds of stations were operating across the country, bringing jazz — the defining music of the era — into American homes and businesses through the new loudspeakers. Jazz, radio, and cocktails were inseparable cultural phenomena of the early 1920s, and cocktail naming consistently honored the decade's technological and musical enthusiasms. The Loud Speaker's formula — gin, brandy, Cointreau, and lemon juice — follows the same equal-parts or near-equal-parts multi-ingredient structure common to Jazz Age cocktail design, combining the era's two prestige spirits alongside the orange liqueur and citrus that defined the sour-family drinks of the period.