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May 16, 2005
The quirkiness of innovation
Speaking of the music business, Les Paul, the inventor of the electric guitar was recently inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Today's Washington Post Science section ('The Log' Puts Paul in Ranks of Top Inventors) tells the story. Paul had been playing around with the problem of amplification of a guitar for years. But when he finally found a solution, no one recognized it.
Paul grew into adolescence and beyond and became a full-fledged pro. He played acoustic. He put pickups on an acoustic. He miked the acoustic. "I tried everything," he said. It wasn't right yet.
Finally, late in the 1930s, he fretted up a length of four-by-four lumber and took it to a nightclub. This one really worked, but "there was no reaction." People didn't know what he was supposed to be doing.
"You have to have a beautiful piece of wood," Paul concluded, "something you can caress, and hold, and love." So he cut two sides off an acoustic guitar and attached them to the four-by-four "so it looked like a guitar." He called it "the log." Today it resides in the Smithsonian.
And the audience figured it out.
It took reverting to the recognized design of a guitar, even if it was completely non-functional, for audiences to understand.
But the guitar maker Gibson didn't figure it out.
Paul took the log to Gibson, in Chicago, but they turned him down. He kept going back, but Gibson kept saying no. "They laughed at me for 10 years," Paul said. "They called me 'the guy with the broomstick with the pickups on it.'"
That is until Paul's friend Leo Fender started work on his own version of the electric guitar.
Fender came out with the first commercial solid-body, in 1950, and five years later followed with the legendary Stratocaster. Gibson answered in 1952 with its first Les Paul model, and history was made.
Technology, design and competition: three key elements of the innovation process. What a wonderful story.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at May 16, 2005 9:33 AM
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