musicianship of the band members , and the volume at which they played . Like today , many of the people who worked at companies that produced musical instruments were musician , who saw the need and opportunity to create a market for electric guitars and amps .
Like many guitarists who came before me , my early quest for volume started with a trip to Radio Shack where I bought an adapter that enabled me to run my guitar and EHX Linear Power Booster into the back of a HiFi console my Dad had given me . Fueled by vintage tubes and a JBL speaker , that thing cranked , much to the chagrin of my neighbors . In a great video that the Smithsonian put together , Paul Reed Smith demonstrates how guitar players would customize console radios to do the same thing before guitar amplifiers became an affordable commonplace . With this in mind , the chicken and egg analogy really doesn ’ t fit , so the logical place to start our deep dive is in the origins of the electric guitar .
In 1890 , U . S . Navy officer George Breed filed and was granted a patent using an electromagnet to elicit sounds from an acoustic guitar . Dr . Matthew Hill is an expert in Organology , the science of musical instruments and their classification . As Dr . Hill points out
on his web site , the use of electricity was designed to create sound rather than amplify it , and hence he does not consider it to be the first electric guitar .
In case you missed the movie ( or weren ’ t born yet ), Gordon Gekko ’ s iconic line , “ Greed is good !” defined the Wall Street era in which the movie was set . In this feature we opted to include a number of diagrams from significant applications to the USPTO ( United States Patent and Trademark Office ). These documents are extremely important in terms of the specific features and dates . The primary goal of these filings is to claim ownership rights of the patentable part of your invention . A number of the early electric guitar-related patents that were granted made for contentious claims between the patent holder and those