Inventions and Inventors Volume 1 - Online Public Access Catalog

was able to produce ten thousand Broadcaster/Telecaster guitars.
Fender had taken a big risk, but it paid off enormously. Between
1958 and the mid-1970’s, Fender produced more than 250,000 Telecasters.
Other guitar manufacturers were placed in a position of
having to catch up. Fender had succeeded in developing a process
by which electric solid-body guitars could be manufactured profitably
on a large scale.
Early Guitar Pickups
Broadcaster guitar / 125
The first pickups used on a guitar can be traced back to the 1920’s
and the efforts of Lloyd Loar, but there was not strong interest on the
part of the American public for the guitar to be amplified. The public
did not become intrigued until the 1930’s. Charlie Christian’s
electric guitar performances with Benny Goodman woke up the
public to the potential of this new and exciting sound. It was not until
the 1950’s, though, that the electric guitar became firmly established.
Leo Fender was the right man in the right place. He could not
have known that his Fender guitars would help to usher in a whole
new musical landscape. Since the electric guitar was the newest
member of the family of guitars, it took some time for musical audiences
to fully appreciate what it could do. The electric solid-body
guitar has been called a dangerous, uncivilized instrument. The
youth culture of the 1950’s found in this new guitar a voice for their
rebellion. Fender unleashed a revolution not only in the construction
of a guitar but also in the way popular music would be approached
henceforth.
Because of the ever-increasing demand for the Fender product,
Fender Sales was established as a separate distribution company in
1953 by Don Randall. Fender Electric Instruments Company had fifteen
employees in 1947, but by 1955, the company employed fifty
people. By 1960, the number of employees had risen to more than
one hundred. Before Leo Fender sold the company to CBS on January
4, 1965, for $13 million, the company occupied twenty-seven
buildings and employed more than five hundred workers.
Always interested in finding new ways of designing a more nearly
perfect guitar, Leo Fender again came up with a remarkable guitar in
1954, with the Stratocaster. There was talk in the guitar industry that