The last piece of the puzzle is radio and interestingly enough, when we combine the popularity of portabilitywith the flat disc invention we get two product directions that are important to understanding separates: the table radio and the pro market.
Table radios were a natural fit as an extension of the console all-in-one radio and turntable combos. Homes in the 1920's and 30's were small by today's standards and while folks who had money could afford a floor standing console, the vast majority of people were waiting for the smaller and more portable models to come out. All-in-one record players came and went quickly - but it was radio most people were interested in and all they wanted. Within a few years, table top radios were sold by the millions. Here's a picture of one out of the ubiquitous Sears catalog. 
What's instructive about this model is that it is truly a separate radio tuner - not an all-in-one console. So by the 1930's we had our first separates and accepted them into our homes: the separate radio tuner and the separate portable turntable.
The final piece of our puzzle is put together by the rise of an industry that began building pro separates for radio stations. In 1921 there were only 5 commercial radio stations in the US - 2 years later there were 556 commercial stations and today there are over 10,000. Someone had to build equipment for these radio stations and guess what type of equipment they needed? Yup, separates. You couldn't use consoles, you had to have separate turntables, phono preamplifiers, power amplifiers, monitor speakers, microphones, recoding equipment and so on.
So by the mid 1920's and into the 1930's our homes had separates and an industry had formed to build "pro separates" for radio stations, recording studios, government applications and so on. It isn't too big a leap of imagination to understand how business owners looking to expand their market share of broadcast quality separates turned to everyday consumers to form the basis of what we know as high-end audio separates.
In the 1950's my father built his own Hi Fi system at home - which no doubt was a major influence on my later life's direction. His turntable was a wheel driven Rek-O-Kut broadcast quality turntable, the electronics from Stromberg-Carlson a company with one foot planted firmly in the pro market and the other in marketing those same products to the new Hi Fi market. To have "broadcast quality" equipment at home was a mark of a true Audiophile.
It took portable turntables and table radios to build acceptance of separates in consumer's homes and it took the need to expand the market possibilities for broadcast equipment manufacturers to put the final piece of the puzzle together. Between these three events an entire consumer market we know today as high-end separates was created and the rest, as they say, is history.
Tomorrow let's look at how we bifurcated separates:added functionality, improved performance.
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