Two starting points
The earliest electric guitars came from two directions. One was the lap steel, a flat instrument played with a metal bar, which lent itself to a simple pickup because there was no neck to shape and no frets to clear. The other was the traditional hollow-bodied archtop, to which makers bolted or mounted pickups. Both appeared in the 1930s. Neither was a solid-body guitar, and neither was designed with mass production as its main goal.
This article follows how makers got from those experiments to guitars built in quantity from solid wood.
Lap steels came first
The Rickenbacker “Frying Pan” is the best-known early commercial electric instrument. Its body was a simple round-bodied lap steel with a long neck. Early versions are described as cast aluminum, and Rickenbacker later made some models from bakelite plastic, which was a popular new material in the 1930s. Because the metal or plastic body did not resonate like a hollow box, it was already, in a sense, a solid instrument. Players of Hawaiian-style music were the main market, and lap steels remained popular for decades, especially in country and Western swing.
Pickups on archtops
Lap steels were not what most guitarists wanted to play. Plenty of working players used standard Spanish-style guitars, so makers began fitting pickups to them. Rickenbacker offered an “Electro Spanish” model, and in 1936 Gibson introduced the ES-150, a hollow archtop with a bar pickup. Epiphone and others followed.
Hollow bodies worked reasonably well at moderate volume. Louder, they had a flaw. The pickup picked up vibrations from the guitar’s top and the air inside as well as from the strings, and when the amplified sound fed back into the body, the result was a howl. Makers experimented with thicker tops, laminated woods and eventually deeper changes in construction.
The case for solid wood
A solid body, in principle, removes most of that problem. It sustains notes longer, resists feedback and lets the pickups do nearly all the work. A few experimenters moved in that direction in the 1930s and 1940s, including builders who built or modified guitars for individual customers. Some well-known examples:
- Les Paul’s homemade guitar from around 1940 to 1941, nicknamed “the Log,” used a solid length of pine with an Epiphone body split in two and attached to the sides for appearance.
- Paul Bigsby built a solid-body guitar for the country player Merle Travis in the late 1940s, which is sometimes cited as an influential early example.
- Other small builders in California, Texas and elsewhere made solid-bodied electrics in limited quantities.
Credit for the first solid-body electric guitar is disputed, and different accounts use different definitions of “solid,” “electric” and “first.” What is clear is that these were handmade, custom or very small-batch instruments rather than catalog products.
Leo Fender and production
The decisive step toward mass production is usually credited to Leo Fender, who ran a radio repair shop in Fullerton, California, and later founded a company building instruments and amplifiers. He wanted a guitar that was cheap to make, easy to repair and straightforward to modify. His design used a flat slab body, two pickups mounted directly to it, and a neck that bolted on rather than being glued. If a neck wore out, it could be replaced.
The first single-pickup version of this guitar was marketed in 1950 as the Esquire, and the two-pickup version was originally the Broadcaster. After a trademark objection from another maker over the name, it was renamed the Telecaster in 1951. The design was modular enough to suit assembly line production, with separate workers or stations producing bodies, necks and electronic parts. In 1951 Fender also introduced the Precision Bass, which used a similar construction philosophy for the bass guitar, and in 1954 the company launched the Stratocaster, with a contoured body, three pickups and a built-in vibrato arm.
Gibson’s response
Gibson, a much older and more traditional company, took longer to move. In the early 1950s, it began working with guitarist and recording experimenter Les Paul, and in 1952 it released the Les Paul model, with a carved maple top on a mahogany back. It was heavier and more expensive than the Telecaster, and its glued-in neck made it harder to repair, but it had a rich, sustained tone that many players valued. Other Gibson models, including the later solid-body designs of the late 1950s, followed.
Gretsch, Rickenbacker, Danelectro and others offered their own versions, and the field became crowded as demand for electric guitars grew rapidly.
Manufacturing and cost
Simpler construction brought lower costs. Slab bodies were easier to machine than carved, bent or laminated hollow bodies, and necks with bolt-on joints could be made and fitted in bulk. Electronic parts came from suppliers of radio and telephone components, and the fine copper wire for pickups came through wire drawing and coil winding. By the late 1950s and the 1960s, guitars were being produced in the thousands, and cheaper brands made them affordable to teenagers.
What remained debated
Solid-body guitars did not replace hollow ones. Jazz players often continued to prefer hollow-bodied instruments, and semi-hollow designs, which combined a solid center block with hollow wings, appeared in the later 1950s as a compromise. Who “invented” the solid-body electric guitar remains a matter of definition rather than a settled fact, and anyone claiming a single answer is simplifying.
Why it mattered
The shift from custom workshop instruments to production models changed who could own an electric guitar. Once a working musician or a teenager could buy one off a shelf, rock and other genres built around electric guitars had a practical foundation.