Fender's guitar empire grew out of a small-town radio repair shop
In 1938 Leo Fender, a trained electronics technician, opened Fender's Radio Service in Fullerton, California, fixing radios, record players and public address systems. Repairing musicians' amplifiers, he grew irritated by their design flaws and started building better ones. Within little more than a decade he had produced the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar.
His first venture into instruments came in the early 1940s with Doc Kauffman, who had helped Rickenbacker develop early electric guitars. Their company made Hawaiian lap steel guitars with a patented pickup and matching amplifiers. After the two parted ways, Leo founded his own firm in 1946 and scored early hits with amplifiers like the Deluxe and Princeton.
The breakthrough guitar arrived in 1950 as the Esquire. Its one-piece maple neck warped in humid weather, so Fender added a steel truss rod and renamed it the Broadcaster, then the Telecaster after a trademark dispute with Gretsch. A key trick was the bolt-on neck: body and neck could be made separately and screwed together quickly by unskilled workers, which kept costs low. The Precision Bass soon followed, and in August 1954 the Stratocaster added three pickups, a spring-loaded vibrato bridge and a body contoured to fit the player.
Success became a burden. By 1964 Leo had 17 buildings, around 600 staff and a nine million dollar backlog of orders, while struggling with illness. In January 1965 he sold everything to CBS for 13 million dollars. Output soared, but players felt quality slipped, and guitars from before the takeover became prized collectibles. In 1981 CBS brought in former Yamaha executives to restore the brand's standing.
Leo himself kept designing, founding Music Man in 1975 and G&L in 1979, both building guitars and basses rooted in his earlier ideas. Fender, meanwhile, grew into a wider group that now also makes acoustic guitars and ukuleles and owns brands including Squier, Gretsch and Jackson.
Source: Fender (company)
