Electric Guitar History

Many kids grow up dreaming about being a rock star and being able to shred on an electric guitar in front of sold out stadiums. Even the most popular music video game, Guitar Hero, is based around people’s desire to be a guitar god. It's clear that the electric guitar has been the single most defining element of music for the 20th century.

So who Invented the Electric Guitar?

During the 1920’s and 1930’s many individuals and companies were experimenting with designs that would allow them to make guitars louder. With bands getting larger, and audiences getting louder, it was critical that the individual instruments could be heard.

In 1924, Lloyd Loar of the Gibson Guitar Company was working on a way to pass the vibrations of the strings through a bridge to a magnet and coil, where they were passed as electrical signals to an amplifier type device. It didn't take long after that, 1928 to be exact, for "electric guitars” to be sold to the public.

But it wasn't smooth sailing however. The problem with the frist electric guitars was in transferring the vibrations to a medium before sending them to an amplifier made the signal too weak. So a more direct method was needed. The first to do this, and get the patent for it, was George Beauchamp, along with Adolph Rickenbacker and his company.

The guitar was known both as “The Pancake Guitar” and as “The Frying Pan” because of its appearance and because it was played flat in the musician’s lap. Available from 1931 on, the guitar was made out of cast aluminum and steel.

Before this however, there were other models being experimented with by many other people. Les Paul, for instance, was working with attaching microphones to guitars as a way to amplify the sound and make it stronger.

By the 1940s Les Paul would invent something much more successful, which was the solid wood body guitar. It was designated as “The Log”, because it was essentially just one piece of wood attached to a neck with pickups and hardware attached.

Leo Fender in the late 1940s developed the first commercially successful, solid body electric guitar. With a single magnetic pickup, it was known as the “Esquire”, while the model with a double magnetic pickup was known as the “Telecaster”. In 1953 Fender introduced the world famous Stratocaster guitar. This guitar had several many unique elements and was much improved over the Telecaster model.

These Gibson and Fender models are what took hold of a generation and caught on in popularity with many influential musicians of the time. These guitars changed the sound of music forever. From it's humble beginnings, the electric guitar transformed an entire art form and was able to capture the emotions of entire generations.

From guitar legend Jimi Hendrix to the Guitar Hero next door, electric guitars are what comes to mind when we think of popular music.