American Heritage

The K&F lap-steel was radio repairman Leo Fender's initial electric guitar design. He created it with "Doc" Kauffman, who had worked for Adolph Rickenbacker's Electro String Instrument Corporation. Completed around 1943, the first K&F had a solid oak body and mail-ordered fingerboard, and was originally intended to be played like a Spanish guitar. But Kauffman and Fender's Direct String Pickup, based on early phonograph pickups, proved better suited to the Hawaiian style. They applied for a patent on their pickup in 1944; it was granted four years later, after Kauffman had left the company.

The Slingerland company, best known as a drum manufacturer, also made guitars and banjos. This rare Slingerland Songster electric guitar, featured in a 1939 company catalog, pre-dates Les Paul's "Log" guitar and is probably the earliest Spanish-style solid-body electric guitar model. The guitar's pickup includes individual string magnets as well as a large horseshoe magnet. Slingerland ceased making electric instruments in 1940 in order to exclusively focus on producing percussion instruments.

The Les Paul model was Gibson's first entry into the solid-body electric guitar market, developed in response to the success of Fender's Broadcaster/Telecaster model. Primarily designed by Gibson president Ted McCarty, guitarist and innovator Les Paul's input included the "rich-looking" gold finish and the original combination bridge-tailpiece. In many variations, the Les Paul model has been the mainstay in the Gibson catalog since its introduction in 1952. Paul's close association with Gibson helped make its line tremendously popular.

Musician Lloyd Loar was an exceptional acoustic engineer at the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company from 1919 to 1924. He designed improvements as well as new models of Gibson instruments, from the F-5 mandolin to the L-5 guitar. The L-5 was Gibson's first archtop guitar with f-holes instead of the round sound hole, and was played by jazz and country musicians including Eddie Lang and Maybelle Carter. As early as 1923 Loar developed an electrostatic pickup system for amplifying instruments. This early experimental electric guitar is equipped with an electrostatic pickup mounted beneath the bridge and with an output jack concealed in the tailpiece.