Electronic Guitars Vital to Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll

In 1935 the bureaucrats at the federal patent office didn’t believe that an electric guitar would work.

So Adolph Rickenbacker sent his newfangled guitar to Washington with a guitarist named Sol Hoopii. Hoopii played Hawaiian music to the examiners and brought back a patent.

It was an auspicious moment, although no one realized it until the 1950s, when those guys with the greasy hair borrowed the electric guitar from country and Western to play something called rock ‘n’ roll.

It was the perfect instrument for the new music. The electric guitar was loud and sexy and parents hated it. And pop music couldn’t have changed into rock ‘n’ roll without it.

So recent is the history of the instrument that that first guitar can still be found in a glass case at Rickenbacker International Corp.’s nondescript factory in Orange County.

A vaudeville guitarist in Los Angeles named George Beauchamp is said to have put that guitar together on his kitchen table in the early 1930s. Beauchamp used a magnet and a coil of wire to create a magnetic field around a string. When the string vibrated, the magnetic field generated an electric signal that could be amplified.

The guitar had a round wooden body and a long neck and was nicknamed “the Frying Pan.” It didn’t look any stranger than its predecessors, however, some of which sported gramophone horns.

Seeking Amplification

Beauchamp was looking for a way to amplify guitars--like a lot of other people--because he already had a guitar company called National. He had brought in Adolph Rickenbacker--a Swiss immigrant who owned a metal-stamping shop nearby--to do some manufacturing for the company.

Rickenbacker also made toothbrushes, and continued to do so even as the guitar company flourished.

Beauchamp and Rickenbacker had a fight with other owners of the company and started a new company in 1931.

Most of their guitars looked like short planks with tuning pegs at one end. A guitarist held one on his lap and played by moving a short glass tube along the frets. The guitars were used mostly in Hawaiian music--which was big then--and in country and Western.

The company’s stabs at making solid-body electric guitars with a more traditional shape weren’t very successful. Most musicians continued to use hollow-body guitars with a microphone or an electric pickup, but these tended to make an electronic screech called feedback at high volume.

It would take another Southern California innovator, Leo Fender, to make an efficient solid-body guitar in the 1940s, dependent on nothing but electronics for its sound, that could be mass-produced and sounded good.

Because of the electronics, the new instrument could produce sounds that had never been heard before.

Meanwhile, Rickenbacker had turned to defense work during World War II. He thought electric guitars were a fad and tried to keep the company in defense work after the war. When he retired in 1953, he sold the company to a distributor of radio and electronics parts named F.C. Hall.

By the time Hall bought Rickenbacker, he already owned a piece of what would arguably become the most famous electric guitar company in the world: Fender.

Long before he heard of Rickenbacker, Hall had sold parts to Fender, a Fullerton radio repairman who was turning out his solid-body electric guitars in his shop, guitars nobody had ever seen before.

Hall, like Rickenbacker, didn’t play guitar. But he had studied electrical engineering in college and was fascinated by Fender’s gadgets. In 1948 he agreed to distribute the new guitars in return for a piece of the action.

Sold Parts Business

“It was more in my field than the parts business,” said Hall, now 81 and retired. “I sold that business a little while later.”

Fender’s first conventional guitar was called the Broadcaster. But somebody else owned the name so it became the Telecaster, one of the half-dozen truly classic guitar types. It’s still being made today.

Hall sold his interest in Fender shortly after buying Rickenbacker’s guitar company and moving it to Orange County to be nearer his home. He started making more conventional-looking guitars too.

These new guitars were played mostly by country and Western musicians. But they were soon discovered by rock ‘n’ rollers.

The two Orange County companies had wildly divergent fortunes. Fender went on to become a legendary name in electric guitars and to be bought and sold by CBS.

Rickenbacker enjoyed a brief boom in the 1960s when the Beatles played his instruments. Then the company stagnated through much of the 1970s.

In the mid-1980s--about 50 years after Adolph Rickenbacker got his patent--the guitars began selling briskly once more.