Guitar makers and players began experimenting with electrical pickups. On today’s electric guitars, a typical pickup consists of a permanent bar magnet that is wrapped tightly with a coil of wire. The ends of the coil are connected to an amplifier. When a metal string vibrates next to the pickup, the bar magnet’s field induces an electric current in the string. The current varies rapidly as the string vibrates back and forth. This varying current, in turn, creates a varying magnetic field of its own, which induces a current in the wire coil. That current, called a signal, is boosted by the amplifier and then used to create sound waves by making a speaker cone vibrate. Instead of a single large magnet, a pickup may contain a series of magnets, sometimes one for each string, but they will usually all be wrapped with the same coil.
The first guitar pickups were much less refined. A Gibson engineer named Lloyd Loar, a musician himself, developed a functional coil-wound pickup as early as 1923, but Gibson was not yet interested in producing electric instruments, so it never introduced Loar’s invention onto the market. Even if it had, the technology needed to amplify the signal and reproduce it through loudspeakers was still a few years away from being commercial.
Loar’s pickup was not electromagnetic in the modern sense. Instead, it used the instrument’s physical vibrations, as transmitted through the bridge, to vibrate a diaphragm stretched over the pickup and create an electrical signal. The first commercially advertised electric guitar, offered by the Stromberg-Voisinet company of Chicago in 1929, used a similar pickup connected to the soundboard. Both systems had trouble creating a strong enough signal. In 1933 Loar began marketing electric guitars, mandolins, and keyboards under the Vivi-Tone label, but he found few buyers.
The guitarist Les Paul also started experimenting with electrical amplification in 1929. Still in his early teens, he jammed a phonograph pickup into his acoustic guitar, slid a telephone mouthpiece under the strings, and wired them to his parents’ radio, which he used as an amplifier. The experiment was not immediately successful. Among other things, a conventional guitar’s sound is meant to resonate through its body and be heard from the outside, so amplifying the vibrations directly under the strings gets the acoustics all wrong. Still, it inspired Paul to embark on a lifelong dual career of performing and engineering. He went on to pioneer multitrack recording and sound-on-sound techniques and develop many devices and methods to expand the electric guitar’s capabilities and revolutionize the recording industry.
Trying to name a single inventor as the first to build a modern electric guitar would be fruitless, but the credit for making the technology commercially viable goes to the Rickenbacker International Corporation (originally the Ro-Pat-In Corporation and then the Electro String Instrument Corporation). The company was founded by George Beauchamp (pronounced “Beechurn”) and Adolph Rickenbacker, a distant cousin of the World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker. Adolph’s name was originally rendered Swiss-style as Rickenbacher, and this spelling was used on the company’s earliest guitars.
In late 1931 Beauchamp built an electromagnetic pickup by placing a pair of horseshoe magnets end-to-end to create an oval, which wrapped around the strings. The coil was placed inside the oval as well, underneath the strings. Since it did not depend on physical contart with the vihtatins? pintar bodv. this pickup had a much cleaner sound and a stronger signal than earlier models. The horseshoe pickup was introduced on the market in a hollow cast-aluminum lap-steel guitar nicknamed the Frying Pan because the playing area consisted of a small round disk. The Frying Pan (officially called the Electro Hawaiian) was the first commercially successful electric guitar.
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MONICA M. SMITH is a historian and exhibit specialist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
