A Brief History of The Electric Guitar

Electric guitars became needed during the big band era in the 30s and 40s as jazz music orchestras; with large brass sections became larger and larger. The first electric guitars that were used were made of a hollow arch-top acoustic guitar body with electromagnetic transducers attached.

Les Paul experimented with the idea of electric guitars by attaching microphones to a guitar. One of the earliest electric guitars used tungsten pickups with the acoustic guitar bodies and was designed by Adolph Rickenbacher and George Beauchamp and was built by Harry Watson, who worked for the Electro Strong Instrument Corporation that manufactured the pickups. This guitar was called Rickenbackers and was the first of its kind in the industry.

The first use of an acoustic electric guitar was by Gage Brewer, bandleader and guitarist, who used two of the electric guitars in a performance in Wichita, Kansas in October 1932. The first recording using an electric guitar was by George Barnes, a jazz guitarist, who recorded two songs on March 1, 1938 – Sweetheart Land and It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame.

Coming closer to the style of electric guitar we have today (a solid body that is made with solid wood and no resonating space) was the Frying Pan or Pancake Guitar, which was produced in 1931. Audiovox may have been the first to build a solid body guitar as early as the mid 30s. Les Paul came on the scene with a solid body electric guitar in the early 40s.

The popular brand Fender came up with the first commercially successful electric guitar in 1946, called the Esquire. This was a stretch from the hollow bodied electric guitars and had only one pick up. The two pick up version of the Esquire was called the Broadcaster originally, but was changed to Telecaster. In 1953, Fender introduced the Stratocaster, which was a deluxe version over the Telecaster.