The first electric guitar was nicknamed the Frying Pan
Long before Fender or Gibson electrics, a small Los Angeles firm sold a long-necked, round-bodied lap steel that players called the Frying Pan. Introduced in 1932, it made Rickenbacker the first known electric guitar maker, and three decades later John Lennon's Rickenbacker helped define the Beatles' look.
The story starts with George Beauchamp, a vaudeville violinist and steel guitarist who wanted his instrument to be heard over a band. His first idea, a guitar with a gramophone-style horn, failed. With violin-maker John Dopyera he then built a guitar with three aluminium resonator cones, patented in 1927 and sold under the National brand. National's factory sat near a metal-stamping shop run by Adolph Rickenbacher, a Swiss-born engineer who had emigrated after his parents died, later anglicised his name, and helped push output to fifty guitars a day.
National ran into trouble. Dopyera quit in 1929 to found Dobro and sued his old firm, and the Depression slowed production. Beauchamp, who had experimented with amplification since 1925, including a one-string test guitar made from a length of timber and a phonograph pickup, turned to a fully electric design. At the end of 1931 he, Rickenbacker, Paul Barth and others formed Ro-Pat-In, short for electro-patent-instruments, and began making cast aluminium Frying Pans in 1932. The pickup used horseshoe-shaped magnets arching over the strings, and several thousand were made before production stopped in 1939.
Innovation continued. The Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts, released in 1935 in a run of just forty-six, was the first instrument named after an endorser and the first with a hand-operated vibrato fitted as standard. Because aluminium drifted out of tune under hot stage lights, many new models were cast in Bakelite. The firm also made amplifiers, some of which a young Leo Fender repaired in his shop before founding his own company.
In 1953 F. C. Hall bought the business and steered it from steel guitars to standard electrics as rock and roll arrived. It introduced neck-through-body construction in 1956 and in 1963 a twelve-string with a clever headstock that squeezed in all the tuners. Then came the Beatles: Lennon bought a Rickenbacker 325 in Hamburg in 1960, refinished it in black and played it on the band's 1964 Ed Sullivan Show debut. The company is now based in Santa Ana, California.
Source: Rickenbacker
