Electric Guitar History

The development of the electric solid body guitar (like the Fender Stratocaster) owes a great deal to the popularity of Hawaiian music in the 1920s and 1930s. Hawaiian guitars were solo instruments played with a metal slide. Electric Hawaiian guitars were the first instruments that depended entirely on their sound being amplified electrically not just acoustically.

In the 1940s Gibson electric guitar models became firmly established. People began to work on ways of applying the solid body of the Hawaiian and steel guitars to regular instruments. In 1944, Leo Fender, who ran a radio repair shop, teamed up with Doc Kaufman, a former Rickenbacker employee, started K & F Company and produced a series of steel guitars and amplifiers. Fender felt the large pick-up magnets in use at the time need not be so large on his fender electric guitars. He incorporated a new pick-up which he wanted to try out into a solid body guitar (like the Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster) based on the shape Hawaiian but, with a regular properly fretted fingerboard. Though only meant to demonstrate the pick-up the guitar was soon in demand. 1946 saw the formation of Fender Electric Instrument Company and the introduction of the Broadcaster.

At the same time Les Paul (of the Gibson electric guitar fame) was working in the same direction. Paul experimented with pick ups throughout the 1930s but, had experienced feedback and resonance problems and began to think about a solid body guitar after hearing about a solid body violin by Thomas Edison. Les Paul was convinced the only way to avoid body feedback was to reduce pick up movement and the only way to do that was to mount it in a solid body. Thus, the Gibson solid body guitar.

Paul persuaded Epiphone (later to make their own Epiphone electric guitars) to let him use workshop on Sundays, where in 1941 he built the historic "log" guitar

In 1947 Paul Bigsby in consultation with Merle Travis built a solid body electric guitar that shared certain design features with the Broadcaster that Fender introduced in 1948. Bigsby wasn't far from Fender electric guitar operation in Fullerton and there is some question who was looking over whose shoulder

Fender was more concerned with utility and practicality rather then looks and wanted a regular guitar with the clear sound of a electric Hawaiian but, without the feedback problems. The result was the the Broadcaster which he began producing in 1948 later renamed the Telecaster.

In 1954, Fender began producing the Stratocaster. Along with the Telecaster and the guitars Les Paul was designing for Gibson, they set the standard for solid body guitars.