The names Leo Fend­er and Les Paul will be for­ev­er asso­ci­at­ed with the explo­sion of the elec­tric gui­tar into pop­u­lar cul­ture. And right­ly so. With­out engi­neer Fend­er and musi­cian and stu­dio wiz Paul’s time­less designs, it’s hard to imag­ine what the most icon­ic instru­ments of decades of pop­u­lar music would look like.

They just might look like fry­ing pans.

Though Fend­er and Paul (and the Gib­son com­pa­ny) get all the glo­ry, it’s two men named George who should right­ly get much of the cred­it for invent­ing the elec­tric gui­tar. The first, naval offi­cer George Breed, has a sta­tus vis-à-vis the elec­tric gui­tar sim­i­lar to Leonar­do da Vinci’s to the heli­copter.

In 1890, Breed sub­mit­ted a patent for a one-of-a-kind design, uti­liz­ing the two basic ele­ments that would even­tu­al­ly make their way into Stra­to­cast­ers and Les Pauls—a mag­net­ic pick­up and wire strings. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Breed, his design also includ­ed some very imprac­ti­cal cir­cuit­ry and required bat­tery oper­a­tion, “result­ing in a small but extreme­ly heavy gui­tar with an uncon­ven­tion­al play­ing tech­nique,” writes the Inter­na­tion­al Reper­to­ry of Music Lit­er­a­ture, “that pro­duced an excep­tion­al­ly unusu­al and ungui­tar­like, con­tin­u­ous­ly sus­tained sound.”

Like a Renais­sance fly­ing machine, the design went nowhere. That is, until George Beauchamp, a “musi­cian and tin­ker­er” from Texas, came up with a design for an elec­tric gui­tar pick­up that worked beau­ti­ful­ly. The first “Fry­ing Pan Hawai­ian” lap steel gui­tar, whose schemat­ic you can see at the top of the post, “now sits in a case in a muse­um,” writes Andre Mil­lard in his his­to­ry of the elec­tric gui­tar, “look­ing every inch the his­toric arti­fact but not much like a gui­tar.” Giz­mo­do quotes gui­tar his­to­ri­an Richard Smith, who dis­cuss­es the need in the 20s and 30s for an elec­tric gui­tar to be heard over the rhythm instru­ments in jazz and in Beauchamp’s pre­ferred style, Hawai­ian music, “where… the gui­tar was the melody instru­ment. So the real push to make the gui­tar elec­tric came from the Hawai­ian musi­cians.”

Beauchamp devel­oped the gui­tar after he was fired as gen­er­al man­ag­er of the Nation­al String Instru­ment Cor­po­ra­tion. Need­ing a new project, he and anoth­er Nation­al employ­ee, Paul Barth, began exper­i­ment­ing with Breed’s ideas. After build­ing a work­ing pick­up, they called on anoth­er Nation­al employ­ee, writes Rickenbacker.com, “to make a wood­en neck and body for it. In sev­er­al hours, carv­ing with small hand tools, a rasp, and a file, the first ful­ly elec­tric gui­tar took form.” (An ear­li­er elec­tro-acoustic gui­tar—the Stromberg Elec­tro—con­tributed to ampli­fi­er tech­nol­o­gy but its awk­ward pick­up design didn’t catch on.)

Need­ing cap­i­tal, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and dis­tri­b­u­tion, Beauchamp con­tract­ed with tool­mak­er Adolph Rick­en­backer, who mass pro­duced the Fry­ing Pan as “The Rick­en­bach­er A‑22″ under the com­pa­ny name “Elec­tro String.” (The com­pa­ny became Rick­en­backer Gui­tars after its own­er sold it in the 50s.) Although the nov­el­ty of the instru­ment and its cost dur­ing the Great Depres­sion inhib­it­ed sales, Beauchamp and Rick­en­backer still pro­duced sev­er­al ver­sions of the Fry­ing Pan, with cast alu­minum bod­ies rather than wood. (See an ear­ly mod­el here.) Soon, the Fry­ing Pan became inte­grat­ed into live jazz bands (see it at the 3:34 mark above in a 1936 Adolph Zukor short film) and record­ings.

How does the Fry­ing Pan sound? Aston­ish­ing­ly good, as you can hear for your­self in the demon­stra­tion videos above. Although Rick­en­backer and oth­er gui­tar mak­ers moved on to installing pick­ups in so-called “Span­ish” guitars—hollow-bodied jazz box­es with their famil­iar f‑holes—the Fry­ing Pan lap steel con­tin­ues to have a par­tic­u­lar mys­tique in gui­tar his­to­ry, and was man­u­fac­tured and sold into the ear­ly 1950s.

The next leap for­ward in elec­tric gui­tar design? After the Fry­ing Pan came Les Paul’s first ful­ly solid­body elec­tric: The Log.

Learn More about the inven­tion of the elec­tric gui­tar in the short Smith­son­ian video just above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of the Elec­tric Gui­tar: An Intro­duc­tion to Every Major Vari­ety of the Instru­ment That Made Rock-and-Roll

The His­to­ry of the Elec­tric Gui­tar Solo: A Sev­en-Part Series

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

Hear the Bril­liant Gui­tar Work of Char­lie Chris­t­ian, Inven­tor of the Elec­tric Gui­tar Solo (1939)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The phrase “when Dylan went elec­tric” once car­ried as much weight in pop cul­ture his­to­ry as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” car­ries in, well, his­to­ry. Both events have reced­ed into what feels like the dis­tant past, but in the ear­ly 1960s, they like­ly seemed equal­ly unlike­ly to many a seri­ous Bob Dylan fan in the folk scene. They also seemed equal­ly con­se­quen­tial. To under­stand the cul­ture of the decade, we must under­stand the import of Dylan’s appear­ance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1965, backed by Mike Bloom­field and oth­er mem­bers of the Paul But­ter­field Blues Band.

The death of rock and roll in the 50s is often told through the lens of tragedy, but there was also anger, dis­gust, and mass dis­af­fec­tion. The Pay­ola scan­dal had an impact, as did Elvis join­ing the army and Lit­tle Richard’s return to reli­gion. Rock and roll was bro­ken, tamed, and turned into com­mer­cial fod­der. Sim­ply put, it wasn’t cool at all, man, and even the Bea­t­les couldn’t save it sin­gle­hand­ed­ly. Their arrival on U.S. shores is mythol­o­gized as music his­to­ry Normandy—and has been cred­it­ed with inspir­ing count­less num­bers of musicians—but with­out Dylan and the blues artists he imi­tat­ed, things would very much have gone oth­er­wise.

In the ear­ly 60s, Dylan and the Bea­t­les’ “respec­tive musi­cal con­stituen­cies were indeed per­ceived as inhab­it­ing two sep­a­rate sub­cul­tur­al worlds,” writes Jonathan Gould in Can’t Buy Me Love: The Bea­t­les, Britain, and Amer­i­ca. “Dylan’s core audi­ence was com­prised of young peo­ple emerg­ing from adolescence—college kids with artis­tic or intel­lec­tu­al lean­ings, a dawn­ing polit­i­cal and social ide­al­ism, and a mild­ly bohemi­an style…. The Bea­t­les’ core audi­ence, by con­trast, was com­prised of ver­i­ta­ble ‘teenyboppers’—kids in high school or grade school whose lives were total­ly wrapped up in the com­mer­cial­ized pop­u­lar cul­ture of tele­vi­sion, radio, pop records, fan mag­a­zines, and teen fash­ion. They were seen as idol­aters, not ide­al­ists.”

To evoke any­thing resem­bling the com­mer­cial pablum of Beat­le­ma­nia, and at New­port, no less, spoke of trea­son to folk authen­tic­i­ty. Some called out “Where’s Ringo?” Oth­ers called him “Judas.” Dylan’s set “would go down as one of the most divi­sive con­certs ever”—(and that’s say­ing a lot)—“putting the worlds of both folk and rock in tem­po­rary iden­ti­ty cri­sis,” Michael Mad­den writes at Con­se­quence of Sound. The for­mer folk hero accom­plished this in all of three songs, “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Phan­tom Engi­neer,” an ear­ly take on “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Pete Seeger famous­ly “threw a furi­ous tantrum” upon hear­ing the first few bars of “Maggie’s Farm,” above, though he’s since said he was upset at the sound qual­i­ty.

The moment was defining—and Dylan appar­ent­ly decid­ed to do it on a whim after hear­ing Alan Lomax insult the Paul But­ter­field Band, who were giv­ing a work­shop at the fes­ti­val. He came back onstage after­ward to play two acoustic songs for the appre­cia­tive audi­ence who remained, unfazed by the vehe­mence of half the crowd’s reac­tion to his ear­li­er set. Yet the rev­o­lu­tion to return rock to its folk and blues roots was already under­way. With­in six months of meet­ing Dylan in 1964, Gould writes, “John Lennon would be mak­ing records on which he open­ly imi­tat­ed Dylan’s nasal drone, brit­tle strum, and intro­spec­tive vocal per­sona.” (Dylan also intro­duced him to cannabis.)

In 1965, “the dis­tinc­tions between the folk and rock audi­ences would have near­ly evap­o­rat­ed.” The two met in the mid­dle. “The Bea­t­les’ audi­ence, in keep­ing with the way of the world, would be show­ing signs of grow­ing up,” while Dylan’s fans showed signs of “grow­ing down, as hun­dreds of thou­sands of folkies in their late teens and ear­ly twen­ties” redis­cov­ered “the ethos of their ado­les­cent years.” They also dis­cov­ered elec­tric blues. New­port shows Dylan accel­er­at­ing the tran­si­tion, and also sig­ni­fied the arrival of the great elec­tric blues-rock gui­tarists, in the form of the inim­itable Mike Bloom­field, an invad­ing force all his own, who inspired a gen­er­a­tion with his licks on “Like a Rolling Stone” and on the absolute clas­sic Paul But­ter­field Blues Band debut album, released in The Year Dylan Went Elec­tric.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bob Dylan Play “Mr. Tam­bourine Man” in Col­or at the 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Get­ting Worse

Tan­gled Up in Blue: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

How Bob Dylan Kept Rein­vent­ing His Song­writ­ing Process, Breath­ing New Life Into His Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.