Most early commercial electric guitars were Hawaiian, or steel, versions. The Hawaiian lap guitar, introduced to the mainland around 1900, differs from the standard Spanish-style guitar in that it is played horizontally, on a stand or in the player’s lap, and has a sliding steel bar that can be moved along the frets for a glissando effect. The ease of learning and playing the Hawaiian guitar made it popular with users and teachers. Its alluring effect of sliding between notes particularly endeared it to Hawaiian, country, and blues musicians. The Hawaiian guitar was especially prominent in American music in the 1920s and 1930s.
Beauchamp filed his first patent application for the Frying Pan in 1932, shortly before it went into commercial production. A second, greatly revised application was submitted in 1934, but it ran into problems. Although the Frying Pan was already on the market, two successive patent examiners questioned whether the instrument was “operative.” To prove that it was, Rickenbacker sent several guitarists, including the well-known Hawaiian musician Sol Hoopii, to perform for the examiners at the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. The patent was finally granted in 1937. By that time other inventors had developed and marketed electric guitars of their own.
The Gibson ES-150 (E for Electric and S for Spanish), introduced in 1936, was the first Spanish-style electric guitar to achieve commercial success, with most of its sales going to professional musicians. Its pickup was much more elegantlooking than Rickenbacker’s bulky horseshoe version. Instead of wrapping around the strings, this bar pickup had two long magnets mounted below the guitar’s face, leaving only a small coil-wrapped metal rod visible beneath the strings.
By the end of the 1930s electronic amplification was firmly established as the best way to make a guitar louder, despite some misgivings among traditionalists. Detractors complained that it did not produce a pure, “authentic” tone, and in a sense they were right: Bypassing the resonance created by the hollow body meant altering the instrument’s traditional timbre. But musicians were championing the electric’s louder sound, which enabled the guitar to compete with other instruments in ensemble performances. Instead of trying to duplicate the warmth and lushness of an acoustic guitar, musicians and engineers tinkered with their equipment and ended up creating an entirely new kind of sound.
The jazz musician Charlie Christian is generally credited with introducing the electric guitar solo. In 1939 he joined Benny Goodman’s band and began stepping to the front of the band and performing long, complicated passages that imitated the style of horn playing. He explained, “Guitar players have long needed a champion, someone to explain to the world that a guitarist is something more than a robot pluckin’ on a gadget to keep the rhythm going.” Christian’s role in popularizing the electric guitar among musicians and the public, and his association with the Gibson ES-150, led to its pickup’s being nicknamed the “Charlie Christian pickup.”
Yet along with its benefits, the new technology brought problems. Reverberation of the sound through the instrument’s hollow body, which was responsible for the guitar’s lovely timbre when played acoustically, caused distortion, overtones, and feedback when combined with electromagnetic pickups. But as the electric guitar developed its own sonic qualities and style of play, musicians and manufacturers realized that it should be designed from scratch with amplification in mind. This led a few innovators to think about replacing the hollow body with a solid one.
MONICA M. SMITH is a historian and exhibit specialist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
