science · 10 August 1909 · 115 years ago
birth
Born 10 Aug 1909; died 21 Mar 1991 at age 81.
American inventor and manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, including the first solid-body electric guitar to be mass-produced: the Fender Broadcaster (1948, renamed the Telecaster two years later). He was an electronics enthusiast and radio repairman who got involved with guitar design after guitar-playing customers kept bringing him their external pickups for repair. Before Fender came along, guitarists met their amplification needs by attaching pickups to the surface of their hollow-bodied instruments. The Stratocaster (1954), had a flashier, contoured, double-cutaway body, with three (as opposed to two) single-coil pickups and a revolutionary string-bending (tremolo) unit. It became a much favored model of rock guitarists.
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