How a Centuries-Old Instrument Got a New Life
Though there are 3,000-year-old carvings of people playing stringed instruments that look vaguely like the modern guitar, the term “guitar,” from the Spanish guitarra, first came into popular usage in the 12th century in Europe. For the first 700 years of it’s life, the guitar was a notably small instrument, played mostly by traveling troubadours and women in parlors. In the late 1800s, as the guitar became more popular, the acoustic guitar began to grow in size, primarily because a larger instrument could produce more sound and could be heard better within a larger band. Nonetheless, there were limits to how much sound could be produced.
The Early History of the Electric Guitar
Though electricity first came into widespread use in the 1870s, primarily for lighting, it took another 20 years before electrical appliances became commonplace. Around 1910, the first patent applications were filed, using telephone transmitters inside stringed instruments (mostly violins and banjos) to augment sound. A decade later, musicians would often attach microphones to the bridge of a guitar, with limited success.
The real birth of the electric guitar came in 1931, when George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker collaborated to invent the electromagnetic pickup, which used coils wrapped around a magnet to convert the vibrations of guitar strings into electrical signals. To be heard, though, those electrical signals had to be sent through an amplifier.
In 1934, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker sought and obtained a patent for an “electrical stringed musical instrument.” By 1936, a number of other guitar manufacturers had introduced electric models, including Gibson, Epiphone, Dobro and AudioVox.
While the first electric guitars were typically hollow-body, archtop guitars with built-in electromagnetic transducers, designers immediately understood that, because the sound is produced electronically, the body didn’t need to be hollow (acoustic guitars produce sound by moving vibrations through the air inside the guitar, much like a drum). In addition, with the early hollow-body guitars, the sound from the strings bounced off the inside of the body, causing both distortion and feedback. Luthiers (professional guitar builders) introduced the first solid-body electric guitars in 1934, which reduced both distortion and feedback (though those features would come to be prized a couple generations later).
The Potential Dangers of the Electric Guitar
Any time you’re using an electrical device, there’s always the risk of exposure to live current. Unfortunately, playing the electrical guitar is no different. In particular, many of the early model electric guitars were not properly grounded. Legendary designer Les Paul nearly died from an electrical shock in 1941. Other famous instances of near-death experiences with an electric guitar include:
- Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones grazed an ungrounded mic stand with the neck of his guitar, knocking him to the ground
- George Harrison had a similar experience during the filming of Let It Be
- KISS lead guitarist Ace Frehley, who put his hand on a metal railing while holding his guitar
