The names of Les Paul and Leo Fender grace many of the most famous electric guitars. Designed in the 1940s and ’50s, their instruments helped create the musical world of today, where the electric guitar is ubiquitous and its impact on culture incalculable. But the real origins of the instrument go back further, to a weird and murky prehistory.
It wasn’t guitar gods who pioneered this technology. It was amateur radio enthusiasts from the 1920s—garage-bound tinkerers with Popular Mechanics subscriptions and patent aspirations. The story of the instrument shows that its invention, like so many others, was not a neat event when one genius saw a need and created a technology to fill it. It was a messy, scattered process, one that’s difficult to piece together even 80 years later.
Somehow, we still don’t really know who invented the electric guitar.
Source: Who Invented the Electric Guitar?
