The names Leo Fender and Les Paul will likely be forever associated with the explosion of the electric guitar into popular culture. And properly so. Without engineer Fender and musician and studio wiz Paul’s timemuch less designs, it’s arduous to imagine what probably the most iconic instruments of many years of popular music would appear like.
They simply would possibly appear like frying pans.
Although Fender and Paul (and the Gibson company) get all of the glory, it’s two males named George who ought to properly get a lot of the credit for inventing the electric guitar. The primary, naval officer George Breed, has a status vis-à-vis the electric guitar similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s to the helicopter.
In 1890, Breed submitted a patent for a one-of-a-kind design, utilizing the 2 fundamental elements that might eventually make their means into Stratosoliders and Les Pauls—a magazineinternetic decideup and wire strings. Unfortunately for Breed, his design additionally included some very impractical circuitry and required battery operation, “consequenceing in a small however excessively heavy guitar with an unconventional playing technique,” writes the International Repertory of Music Literature, “that professionalduced an exceptionally unusual and unguitarlike, continuously sustained sound.”
Like a Renaissance flying machine, the design went nowhere. That’s, till George Beauchamp, a “musician and tinkerer” from Texas, got here up with a design for an electric guitar decideup that labored beautifully. The primary “Frying Pan Hawaiian” lap metal guitar, whose schematic you’ll be able to see on the high of the submit, “now sits in a case in a museum,” writes Andre Millard in his history of the electric guitar, “looking each inch the historic artireality however not very like a guitar.” Gizmodo quotes guitar historian Richard Smith, who discusses the necessity within the 20s and 30s for an electric guitar to be heard over the rhythm instruments in jazz and in Beauchamp’s preferred type, Hawaiian music, “the place… the guitar was the melody instrument. So the true push to make the guitar electric got here from the Hawaiian musicians.”
Beauchamp developed the guitar after he was fired as general manager of the National String Instrument Corporation. Wanting a brand new venture, he and another National make use ofee, Paul Barth, started experimenting with Breed’s concepts. After constructing a pieceing decideup, they known as on another National make use ofee, writes Rickenbacker.com, “to make a woodenen neck and physique for it. In several hours, carving with small hand instruments, a rasp, and a file, the primary fully electric guitar took type.” (An earlier electro-acoustic guitar—the Stromberg Electro—contributed to amplifier technology however its awkward decideup design didn’t catch on.)
Wanting capital, manufacturing, and distribution, Beauchamp contracted with devicemaker Adolph Rickenbacker, who mass professionalduced the Frying Pan as “The Rickenbacher A‑22″ beneath the company title “Electro String.” (The company turned Rickenbacker Guitars after its personaler bought it within the 50s.) Though the novelty of the instrument and its value during the Nice Depression inhibited gross sales, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker nonetheless professionalduced several versions of the Frying Pan, with solid aluminum bodies somewhat than wooden. (See an early model right here.) Quickly, the Frying Pan turned integrated into stay jazz bands (see it on the 3:34 mark above in a 1936 Adolph Zukor quick movie) and documentings.
How does the Frying Pan sound? Astonishingly good, as you’ll be able to hear to yourself within the demonstration movies above. Though Rickenbacker and other guitar makers moved on to putting in decideups in so-called “Spanish” guitars—hollow-bodied jazz fieldes with their familiar f‑holes—the Frying Pan lap metal continues to have a particular mystique in guitar history, and was manufactured and bought into the early Nineteen Fifties.
The subsequent leap forward in electric guitar design? After the Frying Pan got here Les Paul’s first fully stablephysique electric: The Log.
Study Extra in regards to the invention of the electric guitar within the quick Smithsonian video simply above.
Observe: An earlier version of this submit appeared on our web site in 2013.
Related Content:
The Evolution of the Electric Guitar: An Introduction to Each Main Variety of the Instrument That Made Rock-and-Roll
The History of the Electric Guitar Solo: A Seven-Half Collection
Oxford Scientist Explains the Physics of Playing Electric Guitar Solos
Hear the Brilliant Guitar Work of Charlie Christian, Inventor of the Electric Guitar Solo (1939)
Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
