WHO REALLY INVENTED THE HUMBUCKER?
Who invented the humbucker? That’s easy. It was Seth Lover, right? Except Ray Butts got his Filter’Tron patent first, right? Or perhaps they arrived at the idea at the same time? Whichever variation on this answer you go by, the canonical version of events (usually) goes as follows:
At 1957’s NAMM Show, both Gibson and Ray Butts – with Gretsch – showed up with a humbucking guitar pickup. Gibson’s unit came to be known as the PAF (Patent Applied For) pickup, and was created by the company’s electronics expert Seth Lover. Butts’ pickup was the Filter’Tron, which was used in Gretsch guitars from the late 1950s onwards. There was some fallout after the show but Gibson and Gretsch eventually reached an agreement. Butts and Lover invented their pickups independently of one another, and just happened to do so at the same time – and it’s often assumed that neither party had prior knowledge of what the other was working on.
Only that isn’t true.
As we revealed in issue 381, pickup manufacturer Thomas Vincent ‘TV’ Jones has been granted access to a wealth of Ray Butts’ original schematics, business documents and personal correspondences that has been largely unpublished or unexplored
