Some things were invinted for obvious reasons With others, the motivation is less clear. Consider, for example, the electric guitar. When guitarists first crudely electrified their instruments in the 1920s, what were they trying to do? Why change something that had been successful for hundreds of years? Could they have envisioned that the instrument that inspired some of Vivaldi’s and Boccherini’s most beautiful compositions would one day be used by Motörhead and blink-182?
In fact, the driving force behind the invention of the electric guitar was simply the search for a louder sound, a desire that had existed long before the development of electronic amplifiers and speakers in the 1920s. As musical performances moved to increasingly large public spaces over the course of the nineteenth century, the sizes of ensembles grew correspondingly, and musicians needed more volume. For this and other reasons, Americans had been making innovations in guitar design since before the Civil War.
Christian Frederick Martin, Sr., founder of the C. F. Martin Company, was probably the most influential American guitar maker in the nineteenth century. He was born in Germany in 1796 and immigrated to the United States in 1833. During the 1850s Martin developed X-bracing, the use of crossed wooden strips in the guitar’s top for structural reinforcement. He also developed other design features, such as a body shape that was smaller above the sound hole than below.
In the late 1890s Orville Gibson, founder of the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company, designed a guitar with an arched (or curved) top, as is found on a violin. It was both stronger and louder than the earlier flat-top design. (The top of a guitar is the side with the strings.) It helped, but guitars were often still hard to hear.
The quest for volume intensified during the 1920s with the advent of big-band music and commercial radio and the rise of the recording industry. By the end of the decade the big-band era was in full swing, but the guitar was stuck in the rhythm section and couldn’t be heard in crowded, noisy clubs, bars, and dancehalls. Since recordings were made directly to phonograph disks, using either an acoustical recording horn or a single electric microphone for the whole band, there was no way to boost the guitar’s sound in the studio either.
Around 1925 the banjo and guitar maker John Dopyera came up with a nonelectric remedy. Borrowing an idea from the banjo, he designed a metal-body guitar with metal resonating cones built into the top. Unlike earlier acoustic guitars, this one’s sound was created by the vibrations of the resonator cones, not those of the body itself. Resonator guitars produced a loud, brash tone that was popular with some Hawaiian and blues guitarists but was unsuitable for many other types of music.
Another solution was to use steel strings instead of gut. The guitar had to be altered structurally to withstand the increased tension of the heavier strings, and in many cases this meant ever-larger bodies with more internal bracing and stronger necks. The C. F. Martin Company became known in the 1930s for its Dreadnought, a large steel-string flat-top acoustic guitar that was widely imitated by other makers, including Gibson.
These mechanical fixes helped, but only up to a point. So guitarists began to look at the possibilities offered by the new field of electronic amplification, which had been made possible by recent advances in vacuum tubes. Simply putting a microphone in front of the guitar would work in a solo setting or a small group, and this method is still common among folk singers. But in a big band, the microphone would amplify the rest of the band nearly as much as the guitar. What guitar players needed was a way to separate the guitar’s sound and boost it in isolation.
http://www.americanheritage.com/
MONICA M. SMITH is a historian and exhibit specialist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
