LET'S FACE IT, AN ELECTRIC GUITAR WITHOUT AN AMP SUCKS, AND THAT'S WHERE LEE DE FOREST COMES IN...
AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR is a wonderful thing. It’s expressive, it makes a beautiful noise and it’s portable. You can take it anywhere and it will work just fine, from a New York City subway station to the top of Whiskey Dick Mountain in Washington. Its only drawback is it’s a little quiet. One-on-one, a piano, a trumpet or tuba will kick its mellow ass.
As early as 1890, guitarists knew they needed amplification if they were going to be heard. And they were right. Once the instrument found its way to a wall socket, the guitar became an unstoppable force powering the music of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and… Cannibal Corpse!
Over the next 12 pages, Guitar World traces the electric guitar’s evolution — from shrinking violet to life of the party — in 50 astonishing moments. So, buckle up and hold on to your Strat. It’s gonna be a wild ride.
1. The nation’s first electricity-generating power station opens its doors (September 4, 1882)
What does the first power station have to do with the electric guitar? Well, ya can’t have an electric guitar without electricity, ya big dummy! In 1882 Thomas Edison helped form the Edison Illuminating Company of New York, which brought electric light to parts of Manhattan, but progress was, er, shockingly slow. Most Americans still lit their homes with gas light and candles for another 50 years. Only in 1925 did half of all homes in the U.S. have electric power, and it wasn’t until 1960 that virtually all dwellings had electricity.
2. The first patent for an electric guitar design is given to inventor George Breed (September 2, 1890)
In September 1890, U.S. Navy officer George Breed was granted a patent for a design for an electrified guitar. His design was based on a vibrating string in an electromagnetic field, but his “guitar” was small and extremely heavy, and it produced only exceptionally bizarre sustained sounds reminiscent of a cat in heat. Breed is now almost completely unknown as a musical-instrument maker and his instrument now resides in the dustbin of obscurity, but, hey, you gotta start somewhere…
3. Lee de Forest patents the first electronic amplification device (January 29, 1907)
Let’s face it, an electric guitar without an amp sucks, and that’s where Lee de Forest comes in. De Forest’s father was a Congregational Church minister who hoped his son would also become a pastor; instead the young man invented the first electronic device for controlling current flow — the three-element “Audion” triode vacuum tube. This jump-started the Electronic Age and enabled the development of the electronic amplifier, which years later was used by bands like Slayer. So much for being a pastor’s son. De Forest also boasted that he made, then lost, four fortunes. Sounds like our kind of guy!
4. The first paper-cone loudspeaker is developed by Chester Rice and Edward Kellogg (1921–1925)
If you think an electric guitar without an amp sucks, how about an amp without speakers? Yeah, the electric guitar needed those, too. Luckily, Chester W. Rice and Edward W. Kellogg, a couple of clever dudes who worked at General Electric laboratories, put their heads together and came up with the modern loudspeaker, which combined the moving coil driver mechanism with a paper cone diaphragm. They invented the concept in 1921, but it took until 1925 to improve the acoustics enough to compete with existing horn loudspeakers. The speaker’s advantage was that it had a flatter frequency response than horn speakers and could reproduce adequate bass without the enormous length of sound path required in horns.
5. The Stromberg-Voisinet Electro, the first commercial electric guitar, is introduced to general indifference (1928–1929)
The Stromberg-Voisinet Electro was, by all reports, a substantial leap forward from George Breed’s initial crude attempt at building an electric guitar. It employed an electromagnetic pickup device mounted beneath the top of a conventional hollow-body guitar, and it was capable of transforming vibrations from the instrument’s wooden top into an electrical signal that could be amplified. So far, so good — but what did the S-V Electro sound like? It’s difficult to say, because no surviving examples are known to exist. Only a small number of these guitars were produced in 1928, and by mid 1929 they had completely vanished from the marketplace. While some blame the Electro’s failure on the Great Depression, historians have long speculated that so few players bought them because they sounded terrible, and those who did eventually tossed them in the trash.
6. The production model of the Ro-Pat-In Electro A-25 “Frying Pan” hits the market (September 1932)
Now we’re cooking with fire! Hailed as the first successful commercially produced electric solid body guitar, the Ro-Pat-In Electro “Frying Pan” wasn’t much to look at, but it sounded fine and you could coax a respectable amount of volume out of it without incurring feedback. Invented by guitarist George Beauchamp, the “frying pan” (nicknamed because its circular body and long neck made
