The amazing story of the electric guitar is of how guitars became entwined with recorded music and culture, becoming the symbol for change in the soundtrack of the post-world war generation.
Before guitars were amplified they just didn’t have the volume to compete in the popular big bands and orchestras of the times.
They were generally relegated to not much more than adding to the overall rhythm swing.
The story of how this changed starts in 1926 with two pioneers that saw this challenge and laid the groundwork for what is the electric guitar as we know it today.
1926
Musician and lap steel guitar player George Beauchamp’s early efforts at making guitars loud enough to overcome crowd noise, loud drums, and amplified vocals lead him to seek out and ask repairman/inventor John Dopyera to make him a resonator guitar.
Resonator guitars are different from normal acoustic guitars in the fact that they produce sound by conducting the string vibrations through the bridge to one or more spun metal cones called ‘resonators’.
This collaboration resulted in the development of the tri-cone resonator metal bodied guitars, which have three spun aluminum cones attached to the bridge to get as much volume out of the guitars as possible.
1927
Together they set up the National String Instrument Corporation better known as National and in 1927 and released their first Tricone guitars.
1931
The machinist that George Beauchamp’s and John Dopyera’s National guitar company outsourced it’s aluminum cone resonators and brass bodies to was a man called Adolph Rickenbacker.
In his constant efforts to have more volume George Beauchamp experimented mounting a magnetic pickup on his acoustic steel guitar to produce an electrical signal that could be electronically amplified through a loudspeaker.
The idea failed as the acoustic properties of the guitar made it unfeasible, it produced too much unwanted feedback.
George Beauchamp then took his idea to build a solid amplifiable instrument to Adolph Rickenbacker and together they formed the Ro-Pat-In Company which was later renamed to Rickenbacker.
1932
In 1932 George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker released the Electro A-22 lap steel electric guitar better known as the Frying Pan because of its solid aluminum circular body and long neck make it resemble a frying pan.
It was designed to capitalize on the popularity of Hawaiian music in the 1930s.
Rickenbacker produced the Frying Pan instruments from 1932 to 1939.
Adolph Rickenbaker’s chief electric guitar designer was Clayton Orr Kauffman better known as Doc Kauffman.
He was an inventor and lap steel player and was responsible for helping to develop the first pickups used to electronically amplifying these guitars.
This was the same Doc Kauffman who later went into partnership with a certain Mr. Leo Fender at K & F Manufacturing Corporation.
1936
The world’s first commercially successful Spanish-style electric guitar was the Gibson Guitar Corporation‘s ES-150 guitar.
It was first made in 1936 and achieved its success after it became the choice of one of the first two big name guitar hero’s, Charlie Christian (the other being Merle Travis, more on him later).
He was a buddy of influential Texas bluesman T-Bone Walker and was blowing people away in the jazz scene in Oklahoma City when he was recruited by Benny Goodman in 1939.
Soon after, the Gibson ES-150 (which actually stood for Electric Spanish and $150 in price) became Charlie’s main guitar.
The popularity of Charlie and his Gibson ES-150 exploded, despite the fact that they were only just emerging from the Great Depression, and $150 was a lot of money.
1939
As Les Paul became a successful performer, he would later end up hanging out with fellow guitarists at the Epiphone showroom in New York.
Sometimes present were Charlie Christian and the amazing Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
They’d talk about the challenges that the hollow body guitars of the day presented in controlling tone and feedback.
A tinkerer since the 1920s, Les Paul worked on a concept for a solid body guitar, resulting in 1939 of the “Log”.
The guitar was built around a solid 4″ x 4″ slab of pine equipped with homemade tremolo and pickups.
However, audiences and musicians ridiculed the look of the instrument so Les Paul cut an Epiphone archtop body in half and added the “wings” to resemble the shape people were used to.
Even so, people like Epiphone’s Epi Stathopoulo were less than impressed at first.
1944
Paul A.Bigsby, Les Paul, and Leo Fender were friends and used to gather to discuss pickup and guitar design.
This would result in the cross pollination of ideas that developed the blueprint for the classic guitars that we play, love and lust over to this day.
Paul A. Bigsby first began building instruments in his spare time and built one for Les Paul with the same small body as his lap steel.
He also began building his own pickups after building his own winding machine from sewing machine parts.
At first, he wound his own coils in the then established horseshoe style but soon he came up with his own design.
Les Paul promptly installed this newly designed Bigsby single coil pickup in the bridge position of his Epiphone hollow body that he used to record “How High the Moon” on.
Meanwhile, with a friendship that started during the second world war, Leo Fender and the same Doc Kauffman who had worked for Adolph Rickenbacker in the early ’30s, patented a lap steel guitar with an electric pickup.
1945
Leo Fender and Doc Kauffman set up K & F Manufacturing Corporation to design and build amplified Hawaiian guitars and amplifiers and began selling the patented lap steel guitar in a kit with an amplifier.
1947
Paul A. Bigsby moved on from his lap and pedal steel guitars and made not only the famous Bigsby ‘Vibrato’ unit but also his most iconic and influential instrument.
It was the guitar he made for country picker Merle Travis, with a cast-aluminum bridge.
Not only did it have a headstock shape that foretold the Fender Stratocaster with its six-on-a-side tuners, a body shape that presaged the Gibson Les Paul but it also fed the strings through the body which were held by six metal ferrules predating the Fender Telecaster.
1948
Leo Fender started working on the prototype of a thin solid-body electric guitar that would revolutionize guitar production and the world of guitars forever!
Keep your eye out for our next installment ‘History of the Electric Guitar – The Holy Grail Years’ so you can talk proper ‘Guitar Bollocks’ with your friends.
Better still SUBSCRIBE and don’t miss anything with your monthly update and very special offers!
Many thanks to Dr. Fester for his massive contribution to this post, please check out his brilliant Music Blog Fast ‘n’ Bulbous.
Please contact us if you have any ‘Guitar Bollocks’ to say and would like to contribute at guitarbollocks@gmail.com
Great article, can’t wait for next installment. I’ve emailed you some funny guitar vids.