Behind the guitar heroes

Lester Polsfuss, aka Les Paul, was a world-class guitarist and self-promoting showman who was also a technological visionary, fascinated by electronics and studio production.

Like a lot of paradigm-shifting inventions, the solid-body electric guitar seems inevitable in hindsight. Someone was bound to realise that a steel string could be hugely amplified by a magnetic pickup and an external speaker, blasting an electronic signal. Someone was bound to come up with a design that felt familiar and comfortable to a working musician. And someone would certainly figure out how to manufacture the instrument as an affordable mass-market commodity. But the actual advent of the solid-body electric guitar, sometime in the 1940s, was a tangled tale of tinkerers, craftsmen, musicians and businessmen who hardly realised what