The History of the Electric Guitar

The late 1800's brought advances in electricity and provided the basis for the development of countless technologies that included electric motors, trollies and of course lights. Street lamps were starting to appear in major cities such as New York and lights were becoming available to the upper class.

Inspired by the burgeoning electronic age, musicians and inventors were also starting to explore ways to increase the volume of many stringed instruments. In the 1920's and 1930's, the popularity of Big Band and Swing music by artists such as Benny Goodman and Glen Miller coupled with the prevalence of public dances created a demand for guitars that were louder and could be heard above brass instruments and percussion.

Electric guitars were the creation of "luthiers," or those that tune and repair stringed instruments and acoustic guitar manufacturers. During the 1920's and 30's, two Los Angeles-based musicians named George Beauchamp and John Dopyera started to experiment with ways to make the new emerging steel string and electric guitars louder. Their first success came after Dopyera tried using aluminum disks as part of a metal-bodied guitar. The combination of these disks and the metal body made the guitar sound three to five times louder than acoustic guitar. The new style of slide guitar, the Hawaiian guitar, emerged in country and blues music. Like other resonator guitars, the Hawaiian guitar was played on the lap and therefore did not really have enough resonance to be heard over other instruments.

In 1927 Beauchamp and Dopyra established the National String Instrument Co. and patented their new resonator guitar model, which became instantly popular among country and blues slide guitar players. In 1930, Beauchamp was fired from National, and eventually the company began to mass-produce the resonator under the new company Dopyra founded with his brother called "Dobro." The Dobro© company, now owned by Gibson, remains the premier producer of resonator guitars to this day.

After he was fired by National George Beauchamp continued to seek new ways to build guitar volume to accommodate styles of music that were fast emerging. Developments in electronics had made certain discoveries common knowledge, and Beauchamp used these electronic principles to further develop the guitar. He used principles of magnetic field intensity used in electric motors, generators, phonograph needles and acoustic speakers to explore ways to refine the sound of electric guitars. Even when still with Dopyra in 1925 he toyed with using phonograph needles to create a single string electric guitar. He believed if he could develop a device that would tap into the vibrations of each string and translate them into electrical current, he could amplify the sound. This principle was the foundation of tube amplifiers used during that time for sound systems and radios.

Thanks to early discoveries and applications by both Dopyra and Beauchamp, other luthiers began to follow suit and came up with models more closely resembling the electric guitars played today, yet still worlds apart comparatively. Beauchamp brought a design for an electric guitar to the luthier Adolph Rickenbacker in the 1930's, and the company manufactured these guitar models, deemed "Frying Pans" because of their shape under the Rickenbacker name. The Beauchamp-inspired guitar used tungsten pickups, and like the resonator guitar, was used in Big Band and Swing music. Initially, the design of the electric guitar included a hollow arched acoustic guitar body that could be attached to electromagnetic transducers.

The first man to build and market an electric Spanish-style guitar (which is a model still popular today) was Lloyd Loar, an acoustical engineer for the Gibson company, and best known for the part he played in the design of the mandolin. Like many other luthiers, Loar experimented with electrical amplification and guitars in the 1920's, and created a new company called Vivi-Tone in 1933 in order to perfect and manufacture Spanish style electric guitars. Although Loar and Vivi-Tone worked hard to market the electric Spanish guitar, the design of the instrument was not nearly perfected and the music industry wasn't large enough yet to support such a small company with a specialized product. This company failed within a year, but the Spanish style electric guitar inspired maker Gibson to design what is considered to be the first model of the modern electric guitar, the ES-150.

Gibson hired Alvino Rey, the most famous slide guitarist of the time to help them develop a new guitar pickup. The prototype of the instrument was designed by Rey along with an engineering company in Chicago, and the working version was built by Walter Fuller, an employee of Gibson. The pickup was first put onto a lap steel model in 1935, but then was very quickly implemented into a standard arched-top guitar, named the ES-150 (Electro Spanish $150).

Guitarists across the United States playing in every imaginable genre sought the ES-150. Charlie Christian was the first guitarist to use this model of the electric guitar as a soloist in jazz ensembles in the same way a horn player used his instrument. He performed with the famous Benny Goodman Orchestra and was partly responsible for changing the way musicians and music-lovers viewed the guitar as an instrument. The ES-150 is still closely tied to this jazz artist and referred to as the "Charlie Christian" model.

Today's electric guitar differs from these original prototypes mostly because of its solid body, offering no inside airspace like regular acoustic guitars. The first model of this type was designed by Les Paul, a musician and inventor that worked after-hours in the Epiphone Guitar Factory during the 1940's. Les Paul called his first solid body guitar the "log" guitar because it was made simply of a block of wood with a neck attached to it. While he claims to have developed this model in 1941, many experts argue the model did not appear until much later. When Les Paul teamed up with Gibson in the 1950's, he helped them create another instrument that would become their electric guitar calling card and solidify their command over the guitar industry.

In the late 1940's an electrician and amplifier-maker Leo Fender debuted the Fender Broadcaster, renamed the Fender Telecaster, which joined Les Paul's model as one of the more popular guitars of the time. Still, the Telecaster was not quite as perfected as the Les Paul model, and in 1954, Fender created the Stratocaster or Strat, which went onto become the most popular model of guitar in the late 1960's, along with the Fender electric bass, which was the first of its kind. Unlike the more traditional Gibson instruments, Fender's guitars and basses were much less expensive and more streamlined because the company made the neck and the body separately using everyday woodworking tools. Today, electric guitars are typically made to reiterate one of these two designs - the Les Paul or the Stratocaster.

Today there are many different types of electric guitars, but most are fitted with six strings and tuned typically from low to high strings - E-A-D-G-B-E to match the acoustic guitar, although some guitarists today tune their guitars lower to create a more powerful or darker sound. Seven-string electric guitar models exist, played by heavy metal innovators such as Steve Vai. Hard rock star Jimmy Page made popular the custom Gibson electric guitars that have two necks, offering the versatility of two guitars in one. Other innovations such as the six and twelve-string instruments have been played by many progressive rock bands.

Digital technology, introduced to music in the 1980's and 1990's brought even further advancements in the electric guitar by adding the capability for digital distortion on the instrument itself instead of through analog effects.

The electric guitar continues its development and growth as technology advances the music industry. The instrument will undoubtedly continue to grow and change to meet new innovations in music and the world.