The Saturday briefing

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

- by CAROLINE FORD

Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...

I'm a keen guitarist and love the sound of classic rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck. But I wonder who came up with the idea of electrifying the guitar?

Peter Brewer, via email

Big inventions don’t often come out of thin air or appear at exactly one moment in time. The electric guitar as we know it today was not a single invention, but the result of an evolution.

It emerged due to the advent of amplified sound, the changing demands of musicians and marketplace competition.

Although inventors like US naval officer George Breed had been experimenting with electromagnetism to vibrate strings to produce sound as far back as the 1890s, it wasn’t until the 1920s that the first iterations of the electric guitar appeared.