"Patent examiners questioned whether [Rickenbacker's Frying Pan] was 'operative.'"
Monica Smith, Smithsonian Institution
Although the guitar had existed in some form since the Renaissance, it was most commonly used as a parlor instrument. The nineteenth century saw it gradually move toward the concert hall, but the guitar still remained a solo or small-ensemble instrument. It played a formative role in the birth of jazz in the 1920s, but as bands became larger and brass sections became louder, the guitar struggled to make itself heard.
The solution was to amplify the sound. Around 1924, an engineer named Lloyd Loar, working for the Gibson guitar company, developed the idea of the magnetic pickup. Placed beneath the strings of the guitar, the pickup creates a magnetic field. The strings vibrate and disturb the magnetic field; these disturbances are converted to electrical current that is amplified and played back through a loudspeaker. Gibson, however, chose not to pursue Loar's idea.
The instrument most widely accepted as being the first electric guitar was Adolph Rickenbacker's (1886- 1976) Frying Pan, conceived in 1931. Tapping into a brief for Hawaiian music, he produced a castaluminum, lap steel guitar fitted with a large horseshoe-magnet pickup. Shortly afterward, Rickenbacker and his colleagues produced the Electro-Spanish guitar—an acoustic guitar with the same pickup attached. Some would argue that this was, in fact, the first true commercially produced electric guitar. Neither instrument achieved a great deal of success, however. Indeed, the electric guitar was not treated seriously until the late 1930s when virtuoso jazz musicians, such as Charlie Christian, began to demonstrate its potential as an instrument in its own right.
