“This is really it,” said Keith Richards in an interview from the early 2000s, acoustic guitar in hand. “I mean, all they did was put a phone in it!” After a raspy guffaw came a proviso: “But it was the right phone at the right time …”

Was Richards oversimplifying the electric guitar? Yes and no. Obviously, one of the most important musical innovations of the past century didn’t come about by simply shoving a telephone into the sound-hole of an acoustic guitar, and that certainly isn’t the case today; but, a few modern conveniences aside, the electric guitar functions more or less the same as an acoustic guitar.

That said, it was these very “mod cons” that were responsible for cementing the electric guitar’s place in music history and making it the culture and design icon it is today.

Although inventors like George Breed had been experimenting with strings and electric currents to produce sound as far back as the 1890s, it wasn’t until the 1920s that the first iterations of the electric guitar proper appeared. “The origins of the [electric] guitar were in country and big band, and then early forms of rock and roll,” says Andy Mooney, chief executive of Fender Musical Instruments.

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Acoustic guitars were used for both country and big band music, but it was particularly in the case of the latter that they posed a problem. Simply put, they weren’t loud enough to be clearly heard above the other myriad instruments.

In response to this problem, various individuals began looking at ways to amplify the sound of the guitar. In 1928, instrument makers Stromberg-Voisinet created the first commercially produced electric guitar, four years after Gibson fitted an electromagnetic device to violas and basses that picked up vibrations from the bridges of the instruments and converted them into electrical signals.