People who went to the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris were amazed by its size and innovations.
They gawked at the Grand Palais and its enormous glass roof.
They rode the moving sidewalk to get from one exhibition building to another. And they took the new subway to get there in the first place.
One of the most astonishing sights happened after dark.
The Palais de l’Electrique was lit with thousands of multi-colored lamps, a spectacle never seen before. The light bulb itself had been invented only 20 years earlier, and here it was creating daylight at night.
As electricity became more available in cities and out into the countryside, more people dabbled with it to see what it could do.
Some just played around to create sparks, but others invented useful items, from toasters to elevators. For us 21st Century folks, it’s hard to imagine living without electricity.
If you’re reading this on a mobile phone, check your battery.
With all those inventors, some simultaneously working on the same idea, it’s hard to say who invented the electric guitar.
We know that Frederick Dierdorf invented an electrified violin in 1924.
It used a mechanical-electrical transducer to physically convert the vibrations of the violin strings into electrical signals. It wasn’t commercially successful, for a few reasons. One was the electronics were heavy and violins are very light instruments. Musicians didn’t like the extra weight.
Another reason is the mechanical nature of the device resulted in a loss of nuance. High and low frequencies, or subtle overtones, were reduced or lost altogether. Quiet playing might not produce enough vibration to activate the mechanism, and loud playing might distort the signal. In any case, it didn’t capture the subtlety or expressive qualities of an acoustic violin.
In band settings, the guitar was used as a rhythm instrument, though players like Eddie Lang began adding lead lines.
The instrument’s popularity grew, but so did the size of the bands. It wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the trumpets and saxophones. Frustrated guitarists and fans set to work to make it louder.
There were several attempts at attaching microphones to acoustic guitars in the Jazz bands of the 1920s, but the mics caught not only the sound of the strings, but every other nearby sound.
Sometimes that included the sound of the guitar coming out of the amplifier, which created a feedback loop. Such instruments were used, but the volume was still pretty low to help reduce the feedback.
It took George Delmetia Beauchamp to create the first workable and commercially successful electric guitar.
Beauchamp was born in Texas on March 18, 1899.
He developed an interest in music and technology, and was fascinated by stringed instruments and their role in Jazz and Blues.
He was particularly enamored with Hawaiian music. He taught himself the steel guitar and was deeply involved in the Hawaiian music craze of the early 20th century.
Like the Exposition Universelle had done for electricity, the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco exposed the world to Hawaiian music.
Over the Expo’s seven months, 17 million people visited Hawaii’s pavilion. They saw the hula for the first time, and songs like “On The Beach At Waikīkī” and “Kanaka Waiwai” became hits. For a time in the 1920s, Hawaiian records outsold all others.
The steel guitar isn’t played like a standard guitar. It lays on the player’s lap — which is why it’s also called the lap steel — and played with a slide.
The slide is what determines the length of the part of the string that vibrates, and not the frets on the neck. In fact, the strings aren’t even pushed down all the way to the neck like on a regular guitar. Technically it’s a guitar, but entirely its own thing.
Beauchamp was disappointed with the volume limitations of his acoustic instruments, especially in larger ensembles and noisy venues. He started experimenting with ways to amplify their sound without sacrificing tonal quality.
In the late 1920s, Beauchamp moved to Los Angeles, a hub for musicians and instrument builders.
He approached violin maker John Dopyera about creating a guitar loud enough to work in a big group.
They deemed their first attempt – a guitar with a horn like a Victrola’s speaker – a failure. But then they hit upon a guitar with three circular metal plates in the top. The plates would resonate with the strings, so they called it the resonator guitar. It’s still a popular design among Folk and Bluegrass players.
They formed the National String Instrument Corporation to produce mandolins, ukuleles, and other instruments, but mostly resonators.
Their factory was just down the street from a metal shop run by Adolph Rickenbacker, and they hired him to make the metal bodies for their instruments. Rickenbacker’s shop did great work and he eventually became a part owner of National.
In early 1929, resonator sales started slipping, and National didn’t have any new products to replace it. Dopyera left the company – he blamed mismanagement – to start his own company called the Dobro Manufacturing Corporation. He also sued National for copyright infringement. When the companies settled in 1933, Beauchamp was removed from National’s board and, in 1935, the two companies merged to form the National-Dobro Corporation.
During those intervening years, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker formed a new company.
Going through several names, they settled on the Electro String Instrument Corporation.
They were faced with not just the fading popularity of resonators but with the Great Depression.
Realizing that they would need an amazing instrument, Beauchamp went to night school for classes in electronics. He experimented at home and with his employee Paul Barth. His breakthrough came when he invented the magnetic pickup.
It’s a magnet wrapped in copper wire.
The magnetic field is disturbed by the vibrating strings.
And, as he learned from Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, that induces an electric current. The current then travels down the wire and through the guitar cord into the amplifier.
His first design used a horseshoe-shaped magnet to go on both sides of the coil of wire. He added it to a wooden guitar neck with a small, round body and played it as a lap steel. That was the prototype.
The production model was all aluminum, cast in the metal shop. The guitar’s model name was the Rickenbacker Electro A-22, but it’s popularly known as the “Frying Pan” due to its circular body and long neck. Rickenbacker himself called it the “pancake.”
While many people worked on various ways of making the guitar louder, the Frying Pan was the first commercially successful electric guitar and that’s why Beauchamp is credited as its inventor.
The Frying Pan is the familiar sound of Hawaiian music and is pretty common in mid-20th Century Country, Blues, and Western Swing. All told, Electro made about 3,000 A-22s. Being aluminum, they haven’t deteriorated the way wood instruments can, so you can still find them on the used market.
Depending on condition, they’re priced between $7,000 and $20,000.
Beauchamp applied for a patent in 1934 and it was granted three years later.
His invention not only amplified the guitar’s sound but also introduced new tonal possibilities. After all, once sound is converted to an electrical signal, its tone can be altered through filters and boosters.
The guitar could now be a lead instrument. Beauchamp changed the instrument’s role in music and inspired subsequent developments, such as solid body electric guitars designed by Leo Fender and Les Paul.
However, the same year that the company released the Frying Pan, 1931, they also released a design called the Electro Spanish Model B.
It was meant to be played like regular — AKA Spanish — guitars. It had a wood body and was the first solid body electric guitar, beating Fender and Paul by two decades.
Electro, soon to be called the Rickenbacker International Corporation, focused on manufacturing electric guitars and amplifiers, which were soon adopted by pioneering musicians in genres ranging from Jazz to Country.
The electric guitar and similar inventions led to the rise of amplified music in the 1930s and 1940s, influencing the development of Swing, Jump Jive, Rock & Roll, and countless other genres.
On March 30, 1941, Beauchamp went deep sea fishing. On the boat, he had a fatal heart attack. He was 42, and left a wife and two children.
Adolph Rickenbacker lived to be 88. His company continues to make beautiful and often expensive instruments. While they added new designs to their catalog for decades, there is now so much demand for their guitars and basses that they don’t have time or the need to create any new ones.
To this day, musicians want the same Rickenbackers models used by The Beatles, The Byrds, and The Who.
Despite his short life, Beauchamp’s work continues to influence instrument makers and musicians worldwide.
The electric guitar has become a symbol of innovation, expression, artistry, progress, and even rebellion. George Beauchamp’s ingenuity and drive are the origin of that story.
With magnets and copper wire:
He changed the world.
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And here’s what the Frying Pan sounds like:
https://youtu.be/wNnYdsITnrw
Bill! Spectacular article about a subject I love. The video of a frying pan in action is great – can you imagine how it affected first-time listeners back in the day? It was like from outer space! I try to add some info in my comments – a little effort at one-upmanship, I confess – but you exceeded the areas I was going to mention. Great job!
A welcome return. This was great.
I’m left trying to imagine what that early guitar with a horn like a Victrola speaker looked like. I’m guessing extremely unwieldy and liable to induce Hendrix to set fire to it and Townsend to destroy it for a wholly different reason.