So who invented the electric guitar?

It starts with the Pickup.
The "pickup" in which a current is passed through a coil of wire wrapped around a magnet, creates a field that amplifies the strings' vibrations, and
if you search the electric guitar's history Adolph Rickenbacker and George Beauchamp are credited with the invention of the first electric guitar, The Frying Pan, in 1931.
I feel that another man was responsible for it's ultimate creation, a decade earlier.

I CANT HEAR YOU!!
Wooden guitars, while acoustically pleasing were difficult to hear in a live performance setting. Adolph Rickenbacker and George Beauchamp created an aluminum body lap-steel guitar. The metal body lap-steel was indeed louder than it's wooden predecessor but still had some trouble being heard over the brass and drums. So in 1931 Adolph Rickenbacker attached a electromagnetic pickup to their aluminum lap-steel guitar, dubbed it "The Frying Pan", and viola the first electric guitar is born!
Right?
Well I say not so fast.

Some people have credited Stromberg-Voisinet (Kay Guitars of Chicago) as the first person to make an "electrified" instrument as he introduced an unsuccessful transducer-based system in 1928.
While a different type of pickup was used, it was still a guitar with a pickup attached--so the first electric guitar?
Right?
Perhaps, as another visionary was making electrified instruments even earlier.

If you search the electric guitar's history Adolph and Beauchamp are always credited with it's invention but another man, Lloyd Loar, was working with coil-wound pickups and "electrified" instruments as early as 1921--some ten years before the Frying Pan. Loar's coil-wound patent also depicts a pedal device with volume controls and an on-off switch!

As a musician he understood how difficult is was for some instruments to be heard in a live setting, so he installed a pickup on his own F-5 mandolin.
On a side note-- in 1922 the words "rock" and "roll", which were black slang for sexual intercourse, appear on record for the first time, Trixie Smith's "My Baby Rocks Me With One Steady Roll".

I'd never heard of Lloyd Loar but it turns out he was an music instructor at Northwestern University in his later years but he started out working in Kalamazoo Michigan at The Gibson company where he improved existing designs on their then in production instruments and even created new ones.

Lloyd Loar founded the Vivi-Tone company on November 1, 1933 in Kalamazoo for the purpose of "manufacture and sale of wholesale and retail musical instruments, acoustic and electric products, including research, consulting services and financing such business." His company produced mandolins, mandolas, mando-cellos, mando-basses, violins; violas, violin-cellos, double basses, Vivi-Tone Claviers and Spanish, Hawaiian, tenor, and plectrum guitars. Most of these instruments were amplified employing Loar's coil wound pickup design.

So perhaps he did not invent the first actual "electric guitar" but he did slap a coil-wound pickup on an acoustic instrument a decade before Adolph Rickenbacker! And who knows maybe Rickenbacker would not have come up with The Frying Pan without Lloyd Loar.

By the end of the 1930s, electronic amplification proved to be one of the most successful innovations for building a louder electric guitar, despite the misgivings of some traditionalists about doing this. Hey some people thought that acoustic instruments should be kept that way and not be "bastardized". I've heard this about The Polkaholics® take on polka music!

Beauchamp applied for a patent on his "frying pan” on June 8, 1923, and again on June 2, 1934, eventually receiving the patent on August 10, 1937.

Comments

[Roger Hanmerstien]

Actually your all wrong.

The First known true single magnetic pole piece electric guitar pickup was not invented until 1940.

At the North Carolina State Engineering Fair of 1940, first prize went to North Carolina State University physics professor Sidney Wilson for his invention of the world’s first fully functional electric guitar. The guitar was some what crude with a straight flat solid boards like body with a standard neck. The true focus of this guitar was in the electrical performance not glamorous appearance

The guitar also featured seperate volume and tone controlls.The instrument is said to be the first to have a single string pole pickup. Clearly the sensation of the fair, the guitar was played by physicist Mickey May. The instrument is currently on display today at the North Carolina State University. Unfortunately, Sidney Wilson did not patent the guitar since universities did not do so.

[Oliver Peerson]

Your wrong again and here is why:

Lloyd Loar did not patent the pedal device you suggest that he invented in 1921. It was patented 14 years later. US patent 2,020,842; 11/12/35. This patent also features a "pedal-operated circuit-controlling device" for altering the volume -- in essence, the earliest known foot operated volume control. Loar used this pedal control with his reed operated bridge coiled F-5. This patent was filed on July 31, 1933 and assigned to the Acousti-Lectric Company.

ALSO the first true electric guitar pickup was invented in 1930 and placed in a hand carved (neck and all) wooden solid body electric guitar in 1930. This guitar was built in the garage of George Beauchamp.
Get your facts straight for those who will actually read your article.

The resonator reed coil bridge pickup is nothing like the Rickenbacker 1930 modern electric pickup. The failed Loar sound board resonator vibration reed coil would be of no inspiration and is just a telephone microphone.
ViViTone was a partnership of seven people, not just Loar.

The Acousti-Lectric Company was formed just three months after the formation of ViViTone on 01/23/34 the partners had to raise $280,000.00 (figure adjusted to today’s value) to keep the failing company. The coil design was junk. For example if I built a coffin from paper in 1924 would that make me the first when someone else with a brain built one of wood in 1930?

Your time line is also way off. The so called Loar reed coil was not attached to his Gibson F-5 mandolin until 1924. Only six years before the modern electric pickup was built and functional.
In fact Rickenbacker reissued the exact 1930 pickup designed by George Beauchamp in their reissued Rickenbacker 2007 4001C64 electric bass guitar. Buy a piece of history today if you can stand to be on the waiting list.

[Terry Larson]

You editorial is titled, “So Who Invented the Electric Guitar”. A Mandolin is not a guitar! It is obviously, George Beauchamp’s wood solid body “Frying Pan” Electric Pickup Guitar of 1930. The Loar 1924 (so called electric) F-5 mandolin that you speak of predates even the most basic 4 watt DC battery operated amplifier. In fact the acoustic mandolin would have out performed the amplifier. So it is debatable that any sound reproduction was from any other source then the mandolin Also it is not known if the Loar resonator pickup even worked since no patent was applied for. Another point that stands out is that Loar worked for Gibson from 1922 to 1924. Loar did not present the F-5 electric mandolin for production to anyone. 1924 predates the Great Depression cancelling out money issues and production concerns with other manufacturers. Loar did not make another attempt at producing such an instrument again until 1933 after the true electric pickup and guitar was invented in 1930. If Lloyd Loar was truly the inventor of the coil electric instrument (not the guitar) he surely would have built more and sold them. The Lloyd Loar F-5 so called electric Mandolin still exists today and it does not work. C. V. Buttleman's name is familiar because he was Gibson's sales manager for six years. He left Gibson on Oct. 3, 1923, along with general manager and founding partner Lewis Williams. The new Style 5 Master Models, designed by Lloyd Loar, had failed to revive the mandolin market as Williams had hoped, and the company was near insolvency. Presumably Buttleman's resignation was tied in with Williams' (Loar would leave a year later), because Buttleman would surface again in 1933 as a partner with Williams and Loar in the Vivi Tone company, their ill-fated electric guitar venture.

[Patrick Smulinski]

1923/24 Gibson employees Lloyd Loar, Lewis Williams and Clifford Buttleman investigate and experiment with the application of new radio technology to the guitar. Contrary to popular belief Loar did not work alone on this telephone mimicking project. It appears that no working model was ever built.

Loar succeeded with a crude soundboard coil in late 1924 and may very have been first to commercialize using a pickup on a stringed musical instrument(1935), but from looking at the work of Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), coil-wound pickups that are used to sense a vibrating medium pre-dated Lloyd Loar's work.

George Beauchamp applied for a patent of the nick named “Frying Pan” fully electric guitar in 1932 and several times thereafter. However, the US patent office did not grant a patient of the Rickenbacker guitar and pickup until 1937. They could not accept the fact that it actually worked or what category to place the new invention in. The debate was regarding the categories of instrument or electronics. In fact the instrument had to be demonstrated by musicians to the patent office officials to prove that it was actually an electrically operated musical instrument.

[Gary Meatra]

U.S. Navy officer George Breed builds the first documented attempt at the electrification of a fretted stringed instrument was an 1890 guitar. US patent number 435679. It was a cumbersome, impractical twenty pound acoustic electrified guitar. First the strings were electrically charged. The guitar required use of fourteen pounds of iron and copper wire for a powerful electromagnet. The string and magnet circuit were separate. The guitar required a motor to pulse the dc current of the electromagnet by means of a break wheel and thus caused the strings to vibrate. The frets were in fact circuit contact points that would cause the vibrating string to have a specific tone. The guitar was still acoustic and the idea was to provide infinite sustain. The problem was that the wire strings would heat up and the guitar went out of tune fairly quickly. Its other flaw was that only one string could be fretted at one time for volume to remain steady and the full volume was less then a standard acoustic guitar. The guitar was truly an excellent attempt at the electric guitar and is the forerunner of what was yet to come and an inspiration to other designers. Engineer and innovator Lloyd Loar experimented with electrification as early as 1923, developing an electrostatic pickup that sensed vibrations in the soundboard of stringed instruments, but the pickup was never a true success.
Stromberg -Voisinet (Kay Guitars of Chicago) 1928 acoustic guitar had some sort of electric phonograph adapted transducer inside the guitar. This design was produced in two acoustic models, Spanish and a Tenor two point Venetian guitar. However this design was plagued with performance problems. The January 1929 issue of Crescendo magazine mentions a pickup type device made by the Vega Banjo company. In 1933 Lloyd Loar did market a range of electric instruments under the brand name of “ViViTone. Loar’s ViViTone instruments, worked on an electrostatic principle, using the vibrations of the instrument’s bridge as the signal source. The pickup was a capacitive device and thus its performance varied as the atmosphere changed. In addition, it was decidedly less efficient, requiring more amplification. Loar’s ViViTone instruments were not successful.

The electric guitar is an American invention!

Rickenbacker began the modern electromagnetic solid body guitar era with the 1931 aluminum Frying pan; Rickenbacker’s 1931 catalog offers three electric guitars for $70.00 each, noting sustains three minutes long. Then cane the Rickenbacker 1935 A-22 Aluminum guitar, 1936 Electro String, first solid body “Bakelite” Model B guitar, 1936 SP/S-59 and 1944 Model 59. George Beauchamp’s tungsten pickup design of 1930 was the most technologically and commercially successful, and his design is the one on which all modern pickups are based. George Beauchamp’s invention of the electric guitar has many parallels with Columbus’s "discovery" of America. Like Columbus, Beauchamp was the first to achieve something that a great many others were working towards at about the same time. And like Columbus, the true significance of Beauchamp’s invention is often misunderstood. For the true significance of Beauchamp’s electric guitar was not that it was the first, but that it was successful, on both a technological and commercial level.

[geo]

As PL-ites say "Chorea,nie pravda" to your wrong claims = 1st string in USA above^^!! get truth below see:
Václav Prokop Diviš (1698 - 1765) Cesky[CZ] guy, 250 years ago! 1st electrified musical "string" instrument...constructed the Denydor (Denis, "Divisch", d'or, "of gold"), a musical instrument, imitating string and wind instruments and producing orchestral effects. His theories are expounded in his published work, "Theoretischer Tractat oder die längst verlangte Theorie von der meteorologischen Electricität" (Tübingen, 1765; Frankfort, 1768; Bohemian tr. Praha, 1899).

[Neo]

Hey whoever said that les paul invented the first guitar, is an intellectual cripple. The reason being is that George Beauchamp may not have made the patent first, but he was the first to invent the electric guitar. So get your facts strait.

[travis]

well it isall wrong les paul created the guitar

[pop]

u r wihed for supplying information because miss ward would wollop me if not done poo

[RC]

I had a question, you might be able to answer...I heard that electric guitar sales because really popular in the 1960s (especially in '64 w/ the Beatles playing Fenders)

Do you have any idea where I could find a year by year list of the number of electric guitars sold year by year in the 60s.

--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com