History

Since the introduction of the Spanish style acoustic guitar in the 1800's musicians, luthiers and tinkers have been faced with the problem of getting more volume. throughout the mid 1800 to the early 1900 guitar makers had only tackled the problem with by changing the acoustic design. They were building larger flat top and arch-top guitars, and increasingly experimenting with different materials and designs. Taking these designs to the limit, John Dopyera brought the first steel body guitar with banjo style resonators.

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It wasn't until the 1930s that luthiers and engineers began really experimenting with electronic amplification. In 1931 George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker formed a partnership and produced the one of the first electromagnetic pickup. . After many months of trial and error, the first pickup consisted of two horseshoe magnets. The strings passed through these and over a coil, which had six pole pieces concentrating the magnetic field under each string. The image is a diagram from the patent, we can see that this early design has hardly changed.

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Even though with the electo-magnetic pickup designed by Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker had succored with the problem of translating the strings' vibration directly into a current guitar design had not caught up yet. In the 1930s luthiers and players had been adapting the technology into Spanish- style hollow body guitars but as a result of design these guitars had problems with distortions, overtones, and feedback. Finally in 1939 the Slingerland company introduced the first commercially available solid body guitar. In 1940 Les Paul would invent "the Log", a guitar constructed with a solid block of pine, to demonstrate how reducing body vibrations gives a clean tone removing feedback and overtones.