rickenbacker frying pan
Back in 1931, George Beauchamp wasn’t trying to change the world; he was simply looking for a way to get his Hawaiian guitar heard above the much louder drums, brass and wind instruments found in the dance bands of the day. His solution was the electromagnetic pickup, the heart of the modern electric guitar.
Together with Southern California-based engineer and manufacturer Adolph Rickenbacker, Beauchamp created the world’s first electric guitar, famously known, due to its shape, as the “Frying Pan”. It has been suggested that instrument was marketed under the name of “Rickenbacker” because it was easier to pronounce than “Beauchamp”. While others were experimenting about the same time with the electrification of stringed instruments, Beauchamp’s design was the most technologically and commercially successful, and his design is the one on which all modern pickups are based. Beauchamp’s design was the first to be successfully mass-produced and more importantly, to be used on a regular basis by professional players.
When everybody started making them, everybody started playing them. Adolph Rickenbacker
Beauchamp’s pickups are known as “horseshoe” pickups from the two horseshoe-shaped
magnets placed end-to-end through which the instrument’s strings passed through.
The genius of Beauchamp’s design is that used the instrument’s strings rather
than its soundboard (the part of the instrument that produces its sound acoustically)
as the immediate source of the electrical signal. This made for a much more efficient and powerful design.
While the production model of the Frying Pan was made of aluminium, Beauchamp’s prototype (shown here) was made from a single piece of wood (company lore says from a fencepost), thus making the Frying Pan the first solidbody electric as well as the first electric guitar. However, the true significance of the Frying Pan was not that it was the first, but that it was successful, on both a technological and commercial level. Beauchamp’s pickup is the direct ancestor of all electromagnetic pickups found modern electric guitars. From Leo Fender’s bright single-coils and Seth Lover’s smooth and bluesy humbuckers, to hot-rodded modern designs from makers such as DiMarzio and Seymour Duncan; all owe a big debt to Beauchamp’s horseshoe pickup. In addition to the frying pan’s technological success, it was Beauchamp and Rickenbacker’s commercial success with their nascent electric guitars that paved the way for their widespread adoption by musicians and, just as significantly, their manufacture by other companies.
In July of 2007 Matthew presented a paper on the 1931 Rickenbacker “Frying Pan” at the American Musical Instrument Society meeting at Yale University. The complete paper can be accessed from the 'Papers and Publications' page.