The Birth of Gibson Guitars

news recently after the company filed for bankruptcy. Listener who requested this, I apologize because while I did a search in my email and on Twitter, I couldn't find where it was. And maybe you asked me somewhere else, And I apologize for for leaving your name out. If you can get in touch with me and let me know who you are, I'll make sure to to confirm your identity in a future episode. But I thought it was

a great request. I have talked about electric guitars in the past, but it was a long long time ago. Chris Poulette, my original co host, and I we talked all about electric guitars. We're gonna cover some of that same territory here, but it's been like eight years, so I think it's okay for me to go back over it.

So in this episode, we're gonna take a look at the founder of Gibson Guitars, how acoustic guitars work, the early days of electric guitars and how they work, and how the company grew into a household name if your household was pretty musical. In our next episode, we're gonna skip ahead to learn about why the company had to declare bankruptcy and what will come next for it. So we're gonna kind of book end the company in these two episodes. Now, the story of Gibson begins with its founder,

Orville H. Gibson. Orville was born in eighteen fifty six in Chatta Gay, New York, or Chateau Gay if you want to pronounce it the French way, But as far as I could tell, the actual local pronunciation is closer to Chatta Gay. And I couldn't even be getting that wrong. And I apologize because I probably am. I'm a Southerner. That's a Yankee town. Let's chalk it up to that. Anyway, This town is not that far from the boy her

with Canada, and his dad was originally from England. His mom was an American and very little is known about his life. He had several siblings. He was the youngest of the Gibson children, But there aren't a whole lot of records of his life, uh that have been discovered over time. So a lot of the stuff that we've learned about Gibson we've learned kind of through circumstantial evidence. There are a few records that we can cite, but we only know a few facts. So when he was

in his late teens, Gibson moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. We're not entirely sure why. He may have left with his brother, one of his older brothers, but we don't really know. He clearly had an interest in woodcarving and music when he was a kid. He became an accomplished musician, and he was the leader of a group called the Orpheus

Mandolin Club. Author Joyce Brumbaugh suggests in her book Orville H. Gibson A Peculiar Excellency, that he was likely an animated and energetic person because he was performing on the vaudeville's stage. So if you're in vaudeville theater, in order to keep the audience's attention, you have to be really personable. This stands and start contrast with the standard photograph of Orville H. Gibson. It shows in unsmiling, heavily mustached gentleman with a really

intense stare. He does not look like a fun loving individual, but since he was the band leader of a vaudeville group, he probably lightened up a bit on stage. Gibson began making musical instruments in Kalamazoo, possibly starting as early as the eighteen eighties. He worked as a clerk for a couple of Kalamazoo businesses to support himself, and he made

instruments on commission only on occasion. Brumbal says that Orville may have viewed being a luthier, that's a person who actually builds stringed instruments as a kind of retirement plan, like once he got to a certain age, he would be making these kind of out of pleasure on his own pace for money. The first documented Gibson instrument, according to the company official history page, dates to eighteen ninety four. By then, Gibson had his own wood shop. His designs

built off the arch top design of the violin. I'll talk a little bit more about what that arch top design means in just a second, but first let's talk about the basic structure of stringed instruments like guitars and mandolins, again understanding of their anatomy. Now I'm gonna focus mostly on guitars for our discussion, but many of the same things apply to mandolin's. Mandolin's and guitars are not that different, although their strings are grouped and tuned differently. Guitars have

three major parts. You have the body, and acoustic guitars have a hollow body, upon which is the soundboard. More on that in a second. Then there's the neck of the guitar, upon which are the frets, and at the very end of it is the head of the guitar, which has the tuning pegs. So let's start with talking about the body. Now, you can divide the body of most acoustic guitars into three more parts, so you can think of a guitar kind of has almost like a pair shape or a figure rate shape in a way.

The narrow part of an acoustic guitar is called the waist, and it's meant to make it easier to rest the guitar against your knee for playing. The wider sections, the ones that are that bow out a bit, they're called bouts. So the upper bout of a guitar is the bit that connects to the neck of the guitar. The lower bout has the bridge attached to it. The body on an acoustic guitar tends to have a large hole in it, called, appropriately enough, the sound hole. Below the sound hole is

a piece called the bridge. This is the piece that acts as the anchor point for the strings on that end of the guitar. On the bridge is another piece called the saddle, and the strings of the guitar rest against the saddle, which provides a raised point so that the strings are clear of the bridge and of the rest of the guitar the frets along the neck. Otherwise the strings would not be able to vibrate properly. They would be uh brushing up against the guitar and you

would get a buzzing noise. Strings stretch up to the neck to the head of the guitar, where they pass through a piece called the nut and wrap around the tuning pegs. So the nut is a piece with grooves in it that the strings fit through, and it's kind of similar to the saddle on the other end of the guitar. The nut and saddle act as as sort of um a raised section that keeps those strings clear of the rest of the guitar. Right, So very similar

in many ways to the bridge and and saddle. If you to turn the tuning pegs, you can increase or decrease the amount of tension on individual strings, which changes their rate of vibration and therefore their pitch. The saddle and the nut represent the two ends of a guitar string. So even though the string technically extends past the nut and the saddle, so on one end, on the nut end, it continues on to wrap around the tuning peg. On the saddle end, it continues down to the anchor point

on the bridge. Uh, we actually considered the length of the string to be saddle to nut. Now that distance between the nut and the saddle is the scale length of the guitar. When you strum a string, you cause it to vibrate, and vibrations pass through the saddle to

the bridge and therefore to the soundboard. And let's stick with the strings for a second to have a discussion about pitch and notes, and then we'll get back to the soundboard and the body of the guitar and talk a little bit about acoustics, the frequency of the strings vibration determines its pitch. Rapidly vibrating strings create higher pitches than slower vibrating strings, and several factors determine how fast a string will vibrate. So one of those is the

length of the string. Another is the amount of tension that's on the string. The more tension is on the string, the faster it's going to vibrate. The weight of the string matters. The lighter the string is, the faster it will vibrate, and how springy the string is. So if you have a very springy material like a rubber band, that vibrates a lot more than non stringy springy material

like twine. For example, the first string on a guitar tends to be very very thin and have less weight, and the sixth string, the last string on a standard guitar, is much thicker and heavier. Pressing down on a string at a fret will decrease the strength strings length, and that increases the frequency of the strings vibrations, which also means it makes the pitch of the strings note higher. So when you have a guitar, you got that neck,

you got all the frets on there. If you put your finger down on a string and you press down and you play that string, it's going to play at a higher pitch than it would if you didn't have your finger there, if you were playing it as they say open. Open is when you do not have a finger on the neck where you're pressing down at a fret on a particular string. And as you move up the neck closer toward the bridge, the pitch of the

note you play will increase. It will go higher because you're decreasing the length of the string and making it vibrate more frequently within a second. Now, when I talk about frequency, what I'm really talking about is the number of times the string passes over an arbitrary point after you strum it. So imagine you've got a little sensor placed just below a string, and you strum the string, and the sensor counts every time the string leaves and

returns to a certain position. So every time it moves out and back counts as a wave, like a sound wave. The frequency of those waves determines the pitch. So, for example, let's say you've got a guitar and you've tuned it to the standard guitar tuning, which is E, B, G,

D A E. Your first string is tuned to EAT. Now, if you were to press down on the first string at the fifth fret, and then you were to strum that string, the string would vibrate at a frequency of four forty times per second, and that would produce and A note that is the frequency of an A note. Strumming an open first string to produce the E note it naturally would produce would cause the string to vibrate

at three nine point six times per second. That's because an open note represents a longer string, so that's why it has fewer vibrations per second. It's a longer string. If you have a scale length of twenty six inches, meaning that's the distance between the nut and the saddle, the E note would represent a string that's twenty six inches long at that particular tension and that particular weight.

If you put your finger on the fifth threat, the strings length has been reduced to nineteen point four eight inches, and if you were to go all the way down to the twelfth fret, you'd be at thirteen inches. You would produce an E note again, but that would be an octave higher than your original E. The notes from the major scale the C scale R, C, D, E, F, G, A, B,

and then C again. The frequencies for those notes are two hundred sixty four hurts for C to ninety seven hurts for D, three hurts for E, three fifty two hurts for F, three nine six hurts for G four or forty hurts for A four, nine five hurts for B, and five eight hurts for C. Again, that means to go from C to D you would have to multiply sees frequency by nine eight. But to get from D to E you would have to multiply ds frequency by ten ninths. And to go from E to F you

got to multiply by sixteen fifteen. Which sounds like some really screwy math. So how did we figure all this out? We'll explain all that in a minute, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So how did we get this weird math where we take one frequency and then we start multiplying it by stuff like nine eighth or sixteen fifteen or ten ninths or whatever. Well,

we actually work backward. The major scale represents songs or notes rather that we humans find pleasant, So what happened was we figured out the notes that we most like to listen to, and we started tuning our instruments to those notes. We said, oh, this is this has got a nice sound to it. It It appeals to me, so I'm going to tune this inst are meant to play these notes, And we just kept working with instruments to find the tunings that pleased us, and then they became

the standard. Later, when acoustics really began to emerge as a branch of physics, we started to understand the mathematical relationships between these notes. Really, when you get down to it, music is math. So for example, the first ce and the major scale has a frequency of two hundred sixty four hurts. If you move up an octave to the next see as a frequency of five eight hurts. And if you pay attention, you see that that is twice

the number of two sixty four. So the notes we are familiar with end up being arbitrary, right, the thing we called to see it's called a cee for arbitrary reasons, and in fact, the reason why we picked that set of frequencies as opposed to some other one. You know, we picked two sixty four instead of to seventy. It's because it sounded good to us, so we happen to like those notes. That's the ones that ended up being picked. And then it just turns out that, uh, we started

learning about the mathematical relationships later. The mathematical connection allows for alternate tunings. If we take the same progression of fractions that we used in the C scale. You know when I said nine eights and then ten ninths and in fifteen sixteenth, it will use the exact same progression that you use to determine the different frequencies in the C major scale. And then you started with D as

your first note. So you begin with D and then you decide to go up nine eighths and then etcetera, etcetera. You would find out that some of the notes would still have the same frequency as on the C major scale, but some of them would be a little different, not a lot, maybe just a few uh maybe a few waves difference of frequency maybe if you hurts difference, I

should say in frequency. But you would also notice that the both the f uh and the C would have frequencies significantly higher than they did on the C scale. So you look at the D scale, and you say, huh. While most of these are more or less in line with their compatriots over in the C scale, F and C on this D scale are very different. They're higher. That's where we get F sharp and C sharp, and in fact that's where we get sharps. In general. That's

why certain letters have a sharp or a flat. By the way, sharp and flat, it's all dependent on your perspective. Uh So a G sharp is or rather a G flat is the same as an F sharp. So F sharp would mean that the frequency is a little higher than your standard F note. G flat means that the frequency is a little lower than your standard G note. But F and G are right next to each other, So and F sharp and a G flat they're the

same thing. Um so good to know. Also, when you play a note, you typically don't get one pure note, especially on the guitar, you actually get harmonics. Plucking a note doesn't just generate the frequency, the fundamental frequency for that note, but the harmonics at two, three, and four times the pure tone. However, each step up also has a reduction in amplitude or volume. So for example, let's say you play an A note, which is that four

forty hurts. Uh. You also get some harmonics at eight eight hurts, but your amplitude will be lower, like half the amplitude of your fundamental frequency. So we tend to perceive these fundamental frequencies and their overtones as a single note, like we're not hearing multiple notes when we pluck this. They all kind of blend together to make one note. But combinations of overtones can create a different feel for sounds, so they are important in acoustics. The hollow body of

the guitar amplifies the vibrations from the strings. The vibrations move through the strings, through the bridge onto the sound board. It causes air molecules inside the hollow body of the

guitar to vibrate. They emerge from this whole in a concentration, and then those vibrating air molecules cause other air molecules to vibrate, and so on and so forth, until air molecules in your ear canals start to vibrate and press against your tim panic membrane or create areas of low pressure, allowing your tim tympanic membrane to press outward, and again we get the stimulation of nerve cells in our ears

that ultimately our brains interpret as sound. But I've talked about that a lot in recent episodes, so we're not going to go over it again in any greater detail than what I just did. That is so Gibson's designs incorporated an arch structure. I mentioned that earlier. So what did that actually mean? Well, that was something that was common in violins, and by arch structure, I mean that the soundboard on the guitar bowed out, bowed out maybe

or arched out. That's probably the better way of putting it. Arched out rather than being perfectly flat. So instead of having a flat face guitar, the face of the guitar actually uh arched outward a little bit from the player. The whole instrument was carved out of a single piece of wood, and Orville also hollowed out part of the neck of the guitar because he was hoping that it would help improve the quality of sound the guitar would produce.

So at the base of the neck where it joins that upper bout that was actually hollowed out to try

and create more resonance for the guitar. Orville Gibson actually filed a patent for his design, though specifically he filed it for mandolins, but it was the same approach and he filed for it in and the Patent Office granted him a patent in eight While constructing a guitar, Gibson would tap upon the partially finished body and listen for the sound that it made when he tapped it, and this would be a way that he would tune the

guitar's body painstakingly between carving sessions to get it just right. So he listened to it and think, that's not the sound quality I'm gonna need. I'll carve away a little bit more to get the right kind of resonance. This was the same approach that master violin builders were using when they were making their incredible instruments, so it made the process of building a guitar really methodical. Another word

from methodical would be really slow. Gibson actually gained a reputation as a talented luthier, and his instruments were really in demand, but he was not able to produce as many instruments as people wanted, and so he began to look around for a way to expand this and in nineteen o two he sought out help in the form of a business agreement with a collection of Kalamazoo business owners essentially five owners who were willing to launch a

business around this. They formed the Gibson Mandolin Guitar Manufacturing Company. Here's the weird thing. Gibson himself was not a partner in this firm. Instead, he accepted a one time payment of two thousand five dollars for his patents where his patent I should say, and served as a consultant for the first two years of the company's history. But in nineteen o four, Orville Gibson left the company that bore his own name, and he would later leave Kalamazoo, Michigan entirely,

perhaps due to declining health. He drew a pension from the company until his death in nineteen eight teen, um he died from heart failure. The company was building instruments based off of Orville Gibson's designs, however, and in nineteen nineteen Lloyd Lore joined the company l O. A. R. He'd become an important person at Gibson, as would another employee named Ted McHugh, and at that point the company's

guitar line was called the L Series. The series had eschewed some of Gibson's original designs, like the intricate inlays that he would create for his soundboards that cut down on their manufacturing time and had also cut down on a cost. He also they also had abandoned the idea of carving out the UH the instruments sides and next from a single piece of wood, or hollowing out a neck. They had pretty much given up on some of the

more time consuming elements of this. There were models that were called the L the and then they had the L one to the L four someone which had been discontinued by the time that Laura came on, But some of them were actually available in multiple sizes, so different model of guitar UH, sometimes with different sizes within a

single model family. MQ would develop a steel bar that could fit inside the neck of a guitar to improve the instrument's strength and rigidity, while also giving Luthier's the ability to make the next a little more slim, which would make them easier to hold and more comfortable to play. His invention was called a truss rod, and it would find its way into what many people consider to be the first modern acoustic guitar, the L five. The L

five was Lloyd Lore's baby. He had created some novel designs for the company's F five mandolin, and he decided to use those same design principles when working on the L five guitar. The design included getting rid of the sound hole entirely, so instead of having that sort of oval sound hole that's in the face of the guitar, he went with a pair of F holes. They're so called because they look kind of like a lower case stylized letter F, and they were on either side of

where the string were. This is similar to the way violins were constructed and the F five mandolin as well. So this was a new way of um allowing sound to emerge from the body of the guitar, and it gave it a slightly different tone than the guitars that had round or oval sound holes. The guitar also had an adjustable bridge, and an adjustable bridge leads to adjustable action.

The action on a guitar refers to the height of the strings above the guitars fretboard, so you're looking at the neck of the guitar, you're looking at the frets. The frets are slightly raised from the neck. That's the point where you can put pressure so that the string ends up changing its length. You can make the strings shorter by pressing down on the strings at the frets. Well, you want to have the right height between your guitar strings and the frets in order to get the sound

you want. You can actually measure it by setting a ruler down on the fret and then seeing where the string falls on the rulers measurements typic. You would use the twelfth fret on a guitar to measure a strings action. It's kind of the middle of the neck, and keeping the height of the strings relative to the frets at a good action is important to make sure the guitar plays well and stays in tune properly. Low action is easier to play because you don't have to press is

hard to have the strings make contact with the frets. However, it also can create a buzz sound as you play, because sometimes the strings are gonna make contact with the frets and they're gonna vibrate against the frets. That's where

you get that buzzing sound. High action is harder to play because you have to press harder to make the strings make contact with the frets, but they It also plays at a higher volume than low action does, and adjustable bridge made it easier from musicians to get their instruments set just right for their style of play. And uh, you also find that acoustic guitars in general have higher action than electric guitars because that higher volume is necessary

for an acoustic guitar. With electric guitar, you've got electricification. An acoustic guitar you don't have that necessarily. Laura would stay with Gibson until nineteen twenty four, and he would leave the company after trying to convince executives and they should let him experiment with designing electric instruments. They said, no, that doesn't make any sense. There's that's not going anywhere.

Stop doing it. So he left the company and he would go on to found his own instruments company with a couple of other former Gibson employees, and they would start producing electric instruments beginning in nineteen thirty three, although the method they used was not the one that would

become the standard for electric guitars moving forward. Gibson itself would not start getting into the electric guitar business until nineteen thirty six, and I'll talk a little bit more about electric guitars and how they work in just a second, But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. After Lare left Gibson the and he continued to design guitars built off of his work. To improve the volume, new models became a bit larger, to around sixteen to

seventeen inches across the body. In nineteen thirty four, Gibson introduced a guitar called the Super four hundred, a luxury instrument. It had gold plated tuning features at pearl inlays along the neck and ebony fingerboard, and a lot of other embellishments. The name came from the instruments price tag of four hundred dollars in nineteen thirty four. If we had just for inflation, that guitar would cost seven thousand, five hundred sixty dollars in today's money. Who It was also bigger

than the standard Gibson guitars. It measured eighteen inches across the body, compared to that sixteen or seventeen inch average that Gibson typically made. Some musicians felt that this was just too big. Some people thought that really the guitar only existed as kind of a status symbol and not really as a practical guitar. But other folks really like the design. They really felt that they got superior sound

of this guitar style. Gibson also started making flat top acoustic guitars around this time and introduced some lower cost guitars, so, in other words, they started making some guitars that didn't have that arch front face to them, but the company was still slow to adopt the electric guitar approach. There was a call for electric guitars because the acoustic guitar

is such a relatively quiet instrument. One of the popular styles of music at around this time in history was big band, which used drums and really louder instruments to drive the music. So the guitar wasn't really a good match for those types of pieces. The other instruments in the band would drown out the music the guitar was making. In fact, um there were musicians in that era who would say, yeah, you know, I knew the guy was

playing the guitar, but you couldn't hear it. I mean, they might as well just have saved themselves the effort to just kind of move their hand in front of the strings, because no one was going to hear it anyway, because all the other instruments were so loud. If you listen to my episodes on speakers, the ones that just published, you know that this was the same time people were

working on creating electronic loudspeakers. So one solution would be to use a microphone and an acoustic guitar, but that was not really ideal. Uh, you would get a lot of acoustic feedback, you would get a lot of interference stuff where the sounds coming out of the loudspeaker would not sound as smooth or natural as the rest of the instruments in the band. So it wasn't a great solution.

In nineteen thirty one, musician George bow Champ and an electrical engineer named Adolf Rickenbacker decided to tackle this problem and find a way to electrically amplify the volume of a played string. Now, there had been a couple of other experiments creating electric guitars, but they were taking a totally different approach than what anyone else had done at

that point. So bo Schamp, he played Hawaiian guitar and Hawaiian music it tends to rely upon the guitar as the melodic leader of a piece of music, so you really had to make sure the guitar could be heard because that was the heart of the music you were playing. So you had to have something that would allow the guitar to be heard clearly above other instruments. So they came up with a pretty genius idea that we now

call a pickup. Pickups rely upon one of my favorite things to talk about, Magnetic Fields, not the band, though I do love the Magnetic Fields and their Songbook of Love is amazing, so you should go listen to it. If you've not heard Book of Love by the Magnetic Fields, go listen to that. Anyway, I'm talking about the physics

of magnetic fields and electro magnetism. The heart of the pickup is a coil of conductive wire, typically made of copper, and it tends to be wrapped around a permanent magnet. This is inside the body of the guitar and positioned

underneath the strings. So you might use a bar magnet which stretches over the entire length of where the strings are wrapped thousands and thousands of times by very thin copper wire or you might use a series of magnets, one under each string, and each of them wrapped with copper wire. Those strings are made The strings of the guitar are made out of ferro magnetic material, so they

are also you can magnetize them. In fact, due to the proximity of the strings to the permanent magnet in the pickup, the strings themselves are slightly magnetized, and you could even design a pickup in which there's no permanent magnet in the pickup itself. You could have the coils of copper wrapped around some other material that's not a magnet, not a permanent magnetol on its own, as long as the strings of the guitar itself were magnetized. If the

strings are magnetized, this is still going to work. So when you cause one of these strings to vibrate, the magnetized string creates a source of magnetic flux. It's kind of like a fluctuating magnetic field, just caused by the vibration of the string. So the magnetic fields moving, and that's similar to the way a magnetic field would change if you were to run alternating current through an electro magnet.

For example, This moving magnet near the coil of conductive wire induces a change of voltage in the wire, allowing current to flow through, and if you transfer that current to an amplifier and then that that amplified signal to a speaker, you get amplified guitar strings. You're ready to rock. The guitar itself is passive, by the way, so you're

not sending electricity to the guitar. You're not powering the guitar. Instead, the guitar is generating electricity through this process of magnetic flux, inducing a change of voltage in the pickup. So the cable you plug into an electric guitar is there to convey the electric signal from the guitar to an amplifier. It's not sending any power to the device itself. There are some guitars that have active power elements, but your

basic electric guitar doesn't need them. It's completely passive. Gibson started making their own hollow body electric guitars in nineteen thirty six, starting with the e H one fifty. The e H stood for Electric Hawaiian, meaning it was an electric Hawaiian style guitar and it was meant to be played on your lap as a steel guitar would be, so it's a lap guitar. Following that was the E

S one fifty E stood for electric Spanish. Spanish is the general term for the style of guitar that we typically associate with acoustic guitar, just that basic kind of pear shape, hollow body style, that's a Spanish guitar. In nineteen forty there was a guy named Les Paul who invented a new type of solid body electric guitar. So there's no hollow element to this. UH. It was more like a Frankenstein's Monster version of a guitar because he was using bits and pieces of other guitars in this.

But the heart of it, the main piece of it, from the head all the way down to the base of the guitar, was a solid piece of hindwood. It was a pinewood block. The UH actually the neck and fingerboard ended up being from a Gibson guitar. So he would cut this pine block short, put a actual guitar neck and front board onto it, and then on either side of this pine board block he put the old sides to an epiphone archtop guitar. So it makes it look more like a guitar, but the block of what

itself was solid. He had an electric pickup, actually, he had a couple of electric pickups installed on this thing. But the guitar itself didn't have any hollow element to its body, so it had no resonating chamber. And this was a whole new idea, this idea of you don't need that hollow body to generate sound. You can just use the electric pickups to pull out these vibrations and create sound this way. And he called his creation the log.

The thing was the guitar just had a amazing qualities that other guitars didn't like, like an incredible sustain You could play a note and it would sustain for a really long time. Because his pickups were nice and sensitive, they could really detect when the vibration was still going, even when it would normally be inaudible to us, it would be it would generate enough of a signal that through an amplifier you could keep hearing it for a

really long time. And there was no acoustic feedback because there was no there was no hollow body there, so you didn't have any acoustic interference coming in as you played it. So he went to Gibson and he showed off his design and said, I think this might be really useful for you guys. But the company was not blown away and they dismissed less Paul initially. But then

along came a competitor that changed things. That competitor was a guy named Leo Fender who was coming to the same conclusion as less Paul with regard to solid body electric guitar construction. So he had similar ideas of how this should be done, and he began working on this idea in the early nineteen forties and that design that he started working on slowly evolved into what would become the first commercial, mass produced solid body Spanish style electric guitar.

It took about a decade for him to do it, but he was able to do it and launch it, and that was the Fender Telecaster. The Gibson company took notice. Then a decade had past, Gibson had still not really looked at this solid body design. But then Fender comes out with this thing. People are blown away by it, and Gibson says, WHOA, we could have jumped on this a decade earlier, but we didn't. And they get back

in touch with less Paul. So less Paul comes back out and they essentially asked him to kind of consult with them as they start to build a solid body electric guitar design for the company. The extent of less Paul's involvement in that particular design is a matter of some debate. Some people say that he oversaw a design but didn't really have a whole lot of inputs. Some people say that he had a lot of influence on

the design of the guitar. Either way, he did agree to endorse it and that was the birth of the Gibson Les Paul. He became an official product in nineteen fifty two and became the signature guitar for the Gibson company. Gibson would introduce several innovations in guitars over the following years, including a double coil pickup called the Humbucker, the flying V body style of guitar those are pretty wicked, and

then uh a lot more as well. Ted McCarty, who was the president of the company during this era of innovation, he even was inventing stuff that was going into production, including a bridge called the tune oh Manic that had individually adjustable saddles to fine tune guitar action, so each

string had its own individual saddle. McCarty ended up leaving the company in nineteen sixty six, and following his departure, there was a sort of tumultuous time at Gibson, a lot of uncertainty, and there was also a series of mergers and acquisitions that made things pretty complicated and sometimes

put the company in a very difficult position. And I'll talk a little bit more about that series of decisions in the next episode when we unravel the reasons why Gibson recently declared bankruptcy and then look at what the company hopes to accomplish once it emerges from bankruptcy. But that's in the next episode. For now, I invite you guys to get in touch with me. Let me know what you think, Let me know if there are any topics you would like me to cover in future episodes

of tech Stuff. Maybe there's a technology, maybe there's a company or a person that you would like me to talk about. Maybe there's someone you would like me to interview or have on as a guest. I would love to hear all of those ideas. Write me. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a message on Facebook or Twitter the handle with both of those tech stuff hs W, follow us on Instagram, and make sure you go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. You can watch me

record these shows live on Wednesdays and Fridays. We have a chat room there you can participate in that as well. I look forward to seeing you and I'll talk to you again really soon. For moral this and thousands of other topics, is that how stuff works dot com