Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with how Stuff Works in love all Things tech, and several months ago, I did a few episodes about the history of Gibson guitars, which had to file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection not too long ago, and tech Stuff listener Greg asked if I could do a similar treatment for another famous guitar company, Fender, And so today we're going to look at the history of Fender guitars and what differentiates Fenders from Gibson guitars. Specifically, we're gonna look at the difference between the classic Guitar Showdown, and there are a lot of different guitars that Gibson has made. There are a lot of different guitars that Fender has made. But generally speaking, when you were talking about Fender versus Gibson, most to people, I think mean stratocaster from Fender versus the less Paul from Gibson. So what the heck makes us so different? I'm going to tell you, but not right now, because you know how I do. I started off with history, So let's talk about the history of Fender. So the founder of Fender was Clarence Leonidas Leo Fender. He was born on August tenth, nineteen o nine, which was a little bit more than a decade after Orville Gibson had produced his first musical instrument, which, as I recall, was a mandolin. And it was also seven years after Kalamazoo businessman form the Gibson Mandolin Guitar manufacturing company back in nineteen o two. So by the time Fender was born, Gibson was already on its way to becoming a thing, although obviously the the era of the electric guitar battles was decades away. Uh. Also, Leo was never a musician, or at least not a guitarist or a luthier. Uh from by trade. Like, he didn't come from a musical instrument making background. He kind of fell into that. His parents, Monty and Harriet, owned an orange grove in a ranch in California, and he went to school in Fullerton, California. Fullerton, by the way, is not too far away from Anaheim. It's southeast of Los Angeles. When he was eight years old, Leo lost his left eye. He got a glass eyes a replacement. One biography I read said that he lost his eye do to an injury that he suffered in childhood. Another one said that he had actually developed a tumor behind that. I uh, I don't know which was the actual cause, but I do mention it because him losing an eye actually plays an important part in his story, beyond just coping with you know this this change, uh it actually is. You could argue the fact that he lost an eye when he was a kid might have been what made it possible for him to get into making electric guitars. He also attended Junior College in Fullerton. He majored in accounting, and in fact, he had no formal training and electrical engineering at all, but he did have a very keen interest in the subject, and much of that interest actually came from working with his uncle, whose name is John West or was John West West was an auto mechanic, and he also had built his own radio, and he was interested in ham radio. So Fender became fascinated with radios and began to learn how they work, and how do you build a simple radio, how are more complex radios built, how do you repair them? And He got so good at putting radios together or figuring out how to fix a broken radio that he ended up opening out a small business in his home while he was still in high school. He had a little home shop he would work in and just kind of take commissions from locals to build or fix radios. He took piano lessons as a kid, uh, and later he switched to the saxophone briefly, but music really wasn't his passion, at least not not producing it himself, so he never learned to play guitar, and legend hasn't that he didn't even really know how to tune a guitar properly. When he graduated in nineteen thirty the country was in pretty bad shape. The Great Depression had begun the previous year, and so it was a tough time for people to get work and to keep work. Fender originally found work with a company called the Consolidated Ice and Cold Storage Company in Anaheim, California, which sounds like a pretty cool gig. That's a pun. In nineteen thirty four, he married a woman named Esther class Key. They would stay together until she passed away. Uh. He also switched jobs to work for the California Highway Department in California, obviously, but government budgets would lead to layoffs and his job was one of the ones affected. He was one of the people who was let go during that that era. So he went around looked for another job, and he got one as an accountant for a tire company, but that job only lasted six months before the tire company also had to layoff employees, including Fenders. So while that was going on, he was still pursuing his interest with electronics. You know, it wasn't working in that field, but we're still interested in it. A local band leader in Fullerton had asked Fender to build out a p A system, a public address system, so that it could be used for dances. And these were dances that were taking place in clubs and dance halls in Hollywood. So Fender took the job and he built out the p A system, and the guy was impressed and it ended up leading to some other commission work. And once he lost his position at the tire company, when he was no longer able to be there accountant, he decided he was going to take a risk and go into business for himself. I mean after all, he had gone through three different jobs over the past few years and felt that maybe it was time for him to try and do this on his own. Also, by this time it was nineteen thirty nine. It was almost a decade after he had graduated, and nine nine is sort of the end of the Great Depression. The Great Depression, the major downturn was in the first few years, like twenty nine to thirty three, and then thirty nine was towards the very end of the recovery period where the economy was finally getting to the point of pre depression levels. So Fender took out a loan for six hundred dollars and he set up a company, a little store called the Fender Radio Service. It was a repair shop in Fullerton, California. He specialized in repairing small electronic products like radios, amplifiers, public address systems, but also like phonograph some other stuff like that. He began to carry records after a while, as in vinyl albums, because he saw that there was a market for it and there weren't really any record shops in Fullerton, so he said, well, you know, I sell this equipment. I offered to repair this equipment I should sell the media as well, so he did, and that started bringing more customers in, and then he began to carry other types of products like phonographs and and actually sell a lot more radios. Originally he was just repairing them, and over time he built out public address systems and offered them for rental or for sale. There were still a lot of local dances and banned performances going on in the area, and so that ended up being kind of a regular source of income for him. Then he began to build amplifiers, and again he had received no formal schooling in any of this. He was learning by doing. He was learning by tinkering in his shop, putting things together, seeing if they worked, adjusting them. It was very interesting to see that this guy was largely self taught, so he had developed his expertise through experience and through studying what other people had built and figuring out how it worked. At this point, America was entering World War Two, in fact that it did so after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that happened in December. Fender, however, was ineligible to be conscripted for military service because he had lost an eye. He had a glass eye, and it was in this period when he would first start working with developing electric guitars. So you could argue that it's possible Fender was able to pursue his interest in electronics and to start fiddling around with working on electric guitars because he had lost his eye as a kid, and if he hadn't, he would have been conscripted for the United States military and sent to fight in World War Two, and who knows what would have happened. Then maybe he would have come out of it fine, but he might not have taken on a job that would have involved electronics after coming back from the war, So it's an interesting thing to think about. In the early nineteen forties, Finder began to work with one of his regular customers, who is a guy who also owned a radio repair shop. That guy was Clayton Doc Kaufman. Kaufman had brought an amplifier for Finder to fix at one point, and the two struck up a friendship. Doc Kaufman had already made some important contributions to music himself. In ninety eight, he applied for a patent. That patent has the title Apparatus for producing Tremolo Effects or tremolo effects if you prefer tremolo is a wavering effecting whoo boo in a musical tone. And so this was a patent for a type of tremolo bar sometimes called a whammy bar. More appropriately we should call it a vibrato bridge. That's the lever that some electric guitars and some other instruments have that that the purpose of that lever is to introduce this wavering effect. And Kaufman designed a movable tail piece that would increase or decrease the tension on a string. So when you'd string this musical instrument, and it would go through to the bridge at the base of the musical instrument, this bar had a little spring loaded system connected to that bridge where if you press down on the bar, it would increase tension on the strings, which would increase the pitch of the string. When it was vibrating, it would actually vibrate at a faster frequency. If you pulled up on the lever, it would reduce the amount of tension on the string and it would vibrate more slowly and thus decrease the pitch of the vibrating string. Uh So, moving the lever either closer to or further from the face of the instrument. You can slightly change the tension of the string without having to change the tuning, and that's where you get that wavering sound. And um, this is where I need to make that pedantic clarification. Technically speaking, you create a tremolo effect by changing the amplitude of a sound, by changing the volume of a sound, by moving the volume up and down over time, mike, so kind of like turning up and turning down the volume rapidly as a note plays. That's technically tremolo. Vibrato is changed by uh, is that wavering effect by changing the pitch slightly of a sound, so the frequency, not the amplitude. And that's what these these apparatus would do. They change the pitch of the of the string, and so they were That's why we should call him vibrato, not tremolo. But everyone calls him tremolo or wammy bars, so it doesn't really matter. I guess it ultimately matters what people use as the term, but technically speaking, it's not correct. Kaufman had also worked with the company Rickenbacker, which was the company that had pioneered electric guitars, though these were meant to be lap steel electric guitars. Uh. And they were hollow body guitars. They weren't solid body guitars, so they weren't the Spanish style guitars we typically think of. Those are the ones that you know, you would typically have a shoulder strap on them and you play it standing up. Uh. The lap steel guitars, obviously, as the name suggests, those you would play you would sit down. You would have the guitar sitting on your lab and you play it as a steel guitar. Kaufman and Fender worked together to design a phonograph record changer, and they were able to sell that design for the Burnsley some of five thousand dollars, and with that they decided to go into business together and started a new company. They called it K and F Manufacturing. Fender continued to operate his radio repair shop at the same time, and then the moment of truth. At some point, Kaufman and Fender began to discuss the systems that made electric guitars work, and the too decide they were going to give it a shot. What happened next, I'll tell you right after we take this quick break to thank our sponsor Now, the part of an electric guitar that makes it electric ultimately is the pickup. There's some other circuitry that's also technically connected to pickups for most electric guitars, but the pickup is really the element at play. And I talked a bit about these quite a bit actually in the Gibson episodes, but I'm gonna go over it again here because it is in fact the important element of any electric uh stringed instrument. And besides, fenders, pickups are different from the pickups that Gibson used. Now, the pickup is the part of an electric guitar that creates the electric signal that can ultimately be sent out to an amplifier and then on two speakers. And there are two prevailing theories about what is going on with pickups, and they're very similar, but there is a slight distinction between the two. Both of the theories say that basically the electric guitar pickups work because of electromagnetism. That is absolutely the case. It has to be. The pickup has one or more permanent magnets with a coil of copper wire wrapped around the magnets on a frame that we call the bobbin. The purpose of the bobbin is to keep the coil stationary with respect to the body of the guitar, and a typical bobbin, if you're looking at your average electric guitar, has a base plate that attaches to the guitar body by some way, typically by screws. You have a little plate that screws into the face of the guitar and that sits as the base that then holds the magnets in place. And then you have a top plate that fits on top of those magnets, and then this acts as the frame around which you can wind the copper coil. Some pickups, like the ones Fender would use in the Strato caster, have an individual cylindrical magnet under each of the six strings, so each string has its own little cylinder underneath it that is a magnet um. They look like little poles when you take them out of the pickup. Other pickups might have a bar magnet. The Gibson P ninety pickup has is a bar magnet pickup. Rick and Bocker had horseshoe magnets for some of their pickups, but we often see these individual cylindrical magnets in most electric guitar pickups, I would say at least the ones that Fender made. Anyway, electric guitars have metal strings as well, and those strings are made out of nickel and steel. Those are feral magnetic materials. That means those metals are attracted to magnets. If you stick a magnet to a guitar string, you'll feel that there's that connection, right, that they're attracted to each other. The prevailing explanation about how pickups work says that strumming a string causes it to disrupt the magnetic field around the pickup, and that in turn induces current to flow through the coil technically and induces a difference in voltage, which then causes current to flow through the coil. That current can be sent out to an amplifier and then boosted to go to speakers which play this back. They convert that electric signal back into an analog physical uh sound, right, the the speakers convert that electric signal into physical movement. That then we can hear that physical movement being the movement of the drivers inside the speaker. But then there's a secondary explanation. It gets a little more precise, and this is one that's put forth by organizations like the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It goes a little further. That theory states the strings themselves become magnetized because they're so close to a permanent magnet and they are ferro magnetic material. So maybe you've done the little experiment where you take something like a needle and um, it's made of a ferro magnetic material, and you rub the needle several times against a permanent magnet, and then you move the needle over some other ferro magnetic material, maybe other needles or pins, and it picks them up. It's kind of like that. So according to this explanation, when you strum a string, you're really moving a magnet quickly near a coil of conductive wire, which is the basis of electric motors and dynamos. Right like you you have conductive wire and a permanent magnet, and when you move the two in relation to each other, it's the same as having a fluctuating magnetic field near a conductive wire, and that again induces that change in voltage and current to flow. Whether you subscribe to the first explanation or you say no, no, no, this second one is much more correct. Because of that magnetic strings explanation, the result is the same. The result is that strumming a string causes this electrical signal to pass through the pickup and then move on ultimately through the output jack on an electric instrument. Now, I'll talk more about pickups and how they play a part with harmonics later on in these episodes, because that's a very important element in what differentiates a stratocaster from say a less Paul Gibson guitar. I was during that first year of K and F manufacturing when the two founders produced their first electric guitar. Typically it's referred to as the Radio Shop guitar. It was a prototype is just meant to prove be a proof of concept to make sure that they could do this. They were working with a very different pickup design. This one was one in which the guitar strings would actually pass through the magnetic coil. And this was very hard for me to visualize, but fortunately there are are uh pictures. There's there's illustrations from the patent application for this thing. So I pulled those to take a look at them, and one of those illustrations shows that the guitar has a kind of a raised frame that is is attached to the face of the guitar. Think of it's like a it's almost like a little raised box that's on the face of the guitar, and the strings can pass under the top of that box and out the other side. Because the box itself on the center, it looks kind of like it's hollow. In reality, that boxes housing the pickup, so the strings are just passing through the pickup, not overtop the pickup as it would in a normal electric guitar. And the reason that Fender and Kaufman did this was that they said it would produce notes with greater fidelity. You would have less interference, less less of a kind of crunchy sound. You would be able to hear each note much more clearly and distinctly, so you would get a clear, chiming kind of note instead of more of, uh, a high gain kind of sound. This is also where he gets really complicated to try and explain the differences in sound, because we don't necessarily have very quantitative ways of describing them, but they are certainly you can when you hear it, you can definitely tell the difference. Well, this radio shop guitar was again improof of concept. They did not plan to go forward and make more of these and sell them, but they would use it as the basis for a Hawaiian style lap steel guitar, and they started selling those. They also started building and selling vacuum tube amplifiers and they did that for three years. But by nine six, World War two had come to an end, and Kaufman was nervous. He thought this fledgling company wouldn't be able to survive in a post war environment, and that there was gonna be way too much competition, and that there weren't weren't enough customers to go around, so he was afraid he would lose his shirt, so he decided to bow out. But he and Fender would remain friends for the rest of their lives, so there were no hard feelings. But he needed to He felt like he wasn't really sure this was the right thing for him. Fender, however, would stick with it, and he renamed the company the Fender Manufacturing Company. And this tends to be when most company histories for Fender guitars say this is the birth, the nineteen forty six that's the real beginning for Fender. Now there's no official documentation to verify the story I'm about to say, but the general belief is that the first guitar to ever have the Fender f logo on it, which is a famous trademark now, it was a custom lap steel guitar Fender UH and it was built for Leo Fender's friend Noel Boggs in nineteen six. Boggs was a steel guitarist lap lap guitar player. He he took inspiration from a jazz guitarist named Charlie Christian. Charlie Christian actually helped make Gibson guitars famous. He was using a Gibson electric guitar and that was a hollow body Gibson electric guitar that that Christian was using, and he was popularizing this concept of electric guitars. Boggs like the sound of the Fender guitars, so he started to take the sound of the Fender guitars and the technique of Christian and incorporate that. And it was interesting, you know. Charlie Christian he worked in the jazz genre of music, whereas Noel Boggs was more of a country and Western musician. But he started to take some of those techniques from jazz music and incorporated into western and that's sort of helped really push a genre called Western swing. Boggs was not the only person doing this, but he he really was one of the pioneers of that genre. It was around this time when an old friend Offenders named Don Randall played a real important part. Randall had once worked for a radio supply shop called Howard Taylor Wholesale Radio and that I had often worked with Fenders Radio repair shop, and then in Randall went and bought the store he worked for, but he ended up selling off that business once he got drafted for World War Two, and in World War two he served in the Army UH For a while he was part of the Army Corps of Engineers, and then later on he was part of the Army Air Corps, which would of course later evolve into the Air Force. When Randall got out of military service in nineteen forty six, he got back into the radio business as a manager for a shop called Radiotel T E. L. And Randall convinced the shop's owner F. C. Hall and his friend Leo Fender that they should form a partnership that Radio Hotel should become a distributor for the guitars and amplifiers that Leo Finn There was building. Randall would become a salesman in charge of this account, and much of Fender's early success can be traced to Randall's management of sales and distributions. So Leo was making good products, but Randall was the one who was marketing and selling them, so together that partnership really helped cement Fender in the world of music UH. This would allow Randall to kind of scale things up gradually. He first started concentrating on local sales, and later that moved into regional sales, and eventually it moved into national sales, so he was able to help grow the business quite a bit. Fender would relocate his manufacturing facility to a larger factory in Fullerton, and he decided to officially make the design and manufacturing of instruments his primary focus. He would hand off supervision of the service shop the radio repair shop in ninety seven to a guy named Dale Hyatt, and then the shop at self would end up closing in nineteen fifty one, and the music company would become the only UH focus for Leo Fender. At that point, it still seems odd to me that he never learned to play guitar, but that fact did not stop him. He would create designs and then he tested them by asking musicians in the Fullerton area to try out his instruments and his amplifiers and to give him notes um to give him feedback. Man, it's hard to do this without puns. He asked them for their opinions about the equipment he made, and then he would go back and he would tweak those designs. He formed a lot of friendships with people in the music scene around Los Angeles and Anaheim, and there were quite a few at that time. And then uh Fender guitars became known for their really clean tones. The patented pickup really made a big difference. By the end of nineteen forty six or right around the beginning of nineteen Fender decided to rename his company again and he called it the Fender Electric instru Ments Company. Most of his clients in the nineteen forties were creating Western swing music. That was music that Leo Finder himself really liked. But Finder was starting to get the desire to create a Spanish style guitar. In addition to the lap steel guitars he was known for. Gibson had made some arch top electric jazz guitars, but Gibson had not yet produced a solid body electric guitar, and Finder thought he might be able to do that. Um So acoustic guitars, by the way, they typically have a hollow body that acts as a resonant chamber so that sound can resonate inside of it, and they have sound holes. The sound holes helped project sound from acoustic instruments and allow that that sound that's resonating out to create the tone that you want from that acoustic guitar. But electric instruments don't need a resonant chamber. They can have one, but they don't need one. The vibration of the strings creates the frequencies that are converted into electric signals, and that's all you need because then you can amplify those and send them on speakers, so you can create a solid body electric instrument with no hollow compartment at all. Les Paul is the guy we typically point to as the inventor of the solid body electric guitar. He experimented with some really wonky stuff early on, like a two foot section of rail from a discarded pile near railroad tracks. He paired that with a microphone from an old telephone and discovered that he could isolate the sound of hearing just the string vibrating if he plugged the string. The strings vibrations we're the only thing he could pick up. And that's exactly what he wanted. He wanted this isolation of sound. And he also found that the sustain on that note would go for a ridiculously long time, so you could hear a note played for a really long time if it was played on electric instrument. So in one he would go on to create an actual guitar from a four by four and made out of pine and he built in some homemade pickups. He called it the log. He would later fit that very odd looking guitar with some decorative wings designed to look like an epiphone guitar so it would look more like a regular guitar because as a log, people would just take a look at and they're like, oh, that's a that's a toy or something. It's not real. And it was only after he made it look like a quote unquote real guitar that people started to take notice. He had tried to take that idea to Gibson, but the company was not totally eager to jump on board at that time, so Fender decided it was time for him to give it a shot. And I'll tell you how that turned out in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Fender's first solid body guitar was a Spanish style guitar he called the Esquire. The Esquire had a single pickup. It was located near the bridge of the guitar. The bridge, of course, is the anchor point at the base of the guitar's body, so it's the it's the part closest to where you would strum, so that's where you put the bridge. And Fender had made a prototype in the prototype had pine wood for the body. He actually took two slabs of pine wood and essentially glued them together. And in fact, the earliest Esquires aren't technically solid body guitars. They actually are slightly hollow. If you tap on one of those very very early Esquires, you're gonna hear that hollow sound. That was probably in order to help manage how heavy the guitars were, but he would later change the actual production models of the Esquire to be made out of swamp ash instead of pine, which was a much lighter wood, and that meant that he didn't have to have this hollow compartment at all, and they were true solid bodies. He also shaped the body with design that we'd call it cutaway. That's these curved designs you see on on guitars where they get these really kind of sleek, almost sort of pointed sections. The whole purpose for that actually is to create enough room so that a guitarist can have easier access to the upper frets. You know, when they're doing there their high notes, they want to be able to get their hands in there, and the cutaways remove some of that barrier. Unlike the elevated pickups Fender had used in those earlier lap steel guitars, the Esquire had its pickup under the strings, with an individual poll piece for each of the strings. So it wasn't that weird, I shouldn't say weird innovative design where the pickups were actually mounted to the face where the strings passed through. It was underneath the face of the guitar, so um, it wasn't in the way. The kind of pickup it was is a single coil pickup. That means all the poll pieces were surrounded by the same coil of copper wire wrapped around the pubbin and the neck. The Esquire was made from maple, so you had a swamp ash body and a maple neck, and the neck connected to the body of the guitar using an anchor plate held in place by four screws. And that type of construction is called a bolton. It's a bolt on neck guitar, and it's one of several ways that Fender guitars differ from Gibson guitars. Gibson's have necks that are glued into the body of their guitars, so they don't use the boltons. Fenders started to manufacture the Esquire in the spring of nineteen fifty. It appeared in Fender's catalog and you could purchase it for just a hundred thirty nine dollars and nine cents. However, we had just that for inflation, that would mean that it would cost about a thousand, four hundred eighty eight dollars today, not ridiculous for a Fender guitar. Actually fift dollars right in line for a Fender guitar. If you're to and that's if you're looking at a new one, not a Fender guitar, that's a vintage classic guitar. Those can be in the tens of thousands of dollars, depending upon the make and model. While the original Esquire only had one pickup, Thender began offering versions that had two pickups, and the second one was closer to the neck of the guitar, and so you had one pickup that was at the base right near the bridge, and one that was near the neck, so kind of spanning the space where you would strum. He also created a variation of it. They used a trust rod to stabilize the neck of the guitar. Now, trust rod is typically a steel rod that actually is nested inside the neck of a guitar, and the reason that you would include a trust rod is to provide that stability to counteract the tendency of a wooden neck of a guitar to slowly start curving inward over time because it's constantly under tension from guitar strings, so it's kind of like a brace in a way. The variation of the Esquire that had two pickups and a trust rod got a new name. It was called a new type of guitar, and that name originally was the Fender Broadcaster. But there was another company called Gretch, an American music company that made a drum kit that already had the name Broadcaster. So Gretch reaches out the Fender and says, hey, um, not cool man, we already have a Broadcaster products were got. We don't want to have confusion in the marketplace. This is a ninette. So Leo Fenders like, you know what, You're right, you got a point. So they dropped the name from the guitars, so they sold some that were under the brand name Broadcaster. Then for the next run of those guitars, they didn't have a new name yet, so some Fender fans referred to the guitars that were made. There were two single coil pickup guitars with the trust rod. They said, all right, well, since they weren't Broadcasters anymore, we're calling them no Casters because there's no name to them. And then after that, Leo came up with a new name for the design, called the Telecaster. So Broadcasters, no Casters, and telecasters are all essentially the same type of guitar. Keep in mind, Leo kept on making little tweaks to the guitar design over time, so there are differences even between a Teleca, an early Telecaster, and a later Telecaster. Now, the Fender Telecaster became the first commercially successful solid body guitar. The Esquire would continue to be available, mostly originally because Fender was hoping he would use that to target a lower cost electric guitar musician market because it only had the one pickup, so it costs less than the Telecaster did. But then other cheaper electric guitars would later fill that niche There would be other single pickup electric guitars that would come in that would be much cheaper than the Esquire. But there were still many musicians who actually favored the Esquire itself because of the sounds it produced. They said, well, it's not because it's cheaper. It's uh, I know that the Telecasters out there, but the Esquire makes the sound I want. So it would continue in production for several years even though uh. From from a technical perspective, if you're looking at well, it has fewer features than future models of guitars, you would say, well, now it's obsolete, you should discontinue it. Much earlier but musical instruments are different. Some musicians say, no, this is exactly the sound I need. Let's talk a little bit about the sound of the Esquire and the sound of the telecaster and some of the ways that pick ups and switches and tone controls lead to that different sound. First, as I mentioned earlier, the pickup doesn't lead directly to the output jack. There were some more wiring between the pickup and the jack that allows a musician to get the tone that he or she wants. So with the Esquire, that included a three way switch, a volume knob, and a tone knob. So what do those actually do? Well, if you had a guitar with multiple pickups, the switch would normally let you switch between which pickups you were using to generate that outgoing signal. Right, So if you have a guitar that's got two pickups and you have a two position switch, it makes sense, alright, one position is for one pickup, the other positions for the other pickup. But this was a guitar that only had a single pickup. Why would you need a three position switch? And while it was considered to be more of a tone shaper, if you put the switch into position one, it would route the signal so that would only go to the volume control. The tone control knob wouldn't do anything if you had the esquare switch to position one, so this would control the amplitude of the signal sent out to the amplifier. Position two for the esquire would route the signal to both the tone and the volume controls, and that would create a sound that most people describe as being warmer than what you got. If you were had the switch in position one. Position three would again and the signal only to the volume control. It would bypass tone control, but would also go through a circuit with a special capacitor and a resistor network in it. That circuit was meant to suppress signals that represented frequencies and the trouble range of the guitar, creating what some would call a dark tone. So you wouldn't turn this knob and get start generating trouble. What you do is you turn the knob the other way, and what you're doing is you're you're suppressing trouble. You're taking some of those higher frequencies and you're suppressing them. And it's easy to do because you just suppress the parts of the electrical signal that represent those frequencies, So the switch would let the bass sounds play through with more volume, and Finder may have meant for this to let guitar players use their guitars kind of like a proto electric bass guitar. We'll talk more about bass guitars in our next episode. Tone knobs, by the way, are essentially potentialometers. Tone knobs are a bit more of a precise way to achieve what position three on the Esquire switch would do. You can do what's called rolling off the trouble on a guitar. So if you said a tone knob at ten, then your outgoing signal should represent all the frequencies your guitar strings are producing and the pickup is detecting. But sometimes that means you get a sound that has sort of a harsh or shrill quality to it. So you can dial that back, you can turn down that knob, and that increases resistance for those frequencies. Let's less of those frequencies through to the amplifier and thus to the speakers, and it can mellow out sounds, it can make them lower and darker and suppress that higher, shriller sound, and it's uh, kind of interesting. Like I've seen demonstrations of this, and you can when you know what's happening and you're really listening, you can you can definitely tell the difference. It's not like it's just you know, an illusion or it's wishful thinking. It really does change the tone of music. Amplifiers, by the way, also have controls like this, so you can actually really shape the way a guitar sounds by working not just with the controls on the guitar, but also the controls on the amplifier you're using. So some musicians prefer to keep the tone on their guitar set and never touch it again, and then they just deal with the tone controls on an amplifier and uh, they that's how they prefer to do it. In that way, they don't ever have to mess with their guitar controls. Others like to be able to control the way a guitar sounds in mid performance, you know, switch from one kind of sound to another while still using the same instrument. And it's easier to do that if you can just quickly adjust to control that's on the guitar itself. So it all depends on what you wanted to sound. Now I'm getting pretty far into this, so in our next episode, I'm going to start off by talking about how the telecaster change things up and having to pickups and how that changes the sound. And we'll also talk about how the Fender guitar helped usher in a new genre of music. In the early nineteen fifties, Fender was making guitars mostly for Western swing bands and big bands. These were really large ensembles where electric guitars have become a necessity because if you had a guitar in your group, the only way you're going to hear it is if you had some form of amplification, because otherwise the instrument was just too soft to hear over the rest of the instruments, and putting a microphone in front of an acoustic guitar sometimes would create a lot of feedback and other distortion issues that just made the sound not very pleasing to the ear. So the electric guitar almost rose out of necessity. But this innovation was also saying the stage for a new type of band, one with fewer instruments that create a louder sound, and the telecaster would help pave the way. I'll tell you more about that in our next episode. For now, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, why don't you send me a message. You can write me at the email address text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. 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Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with how Stuff Works in love all Things tech, and several months ago, I did a few episodes about the history of Gibson guitars, which had to file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection not too long ago, and tech Stuff listener Greg asked if I could do a similar treatment for another famous guitar company, Fender, And so today we're going to look at the history of Fender guitars and what differentiates Fenders from Gibson guitars. Specifically, we're gonna look at the difference between the classic Guitar Showdown, and there are a lot of different guitars that Gibson has made. There are a lot of different guitars that Fender has made. But generally speaking, when you were talking about Fender versus Gibson, most to people, I think mean stratocaster from Fender versus the less Paul from Gibson. So what the heck makes us so different? I'm going to tell you, but not right now, because you know how I do. I started off with history, So let's talk about the history of Fender. So the founder of Fender was Clarence Leonidas Leo Fender. He was born on August tenth, nineteen o nine, which was a little bit more than a decade after Orville Gibson had produced his first musical instrument, which, as I recall, was a mandolin. And it was also seven years after Kalamazoo businessman form the Gibson Mandolin Guitar manufacturing company back in nineteen o two. So by the time Fender was born, Gibson was already on its way to becoming a thing, although obviously the the era of the electric guitar battles was decades away. Uh. Also, Leo was never a musician, or at least not a guitarist or a luthier. Uh from by trade. Like, he didn't come from a musical instrument making background. He kind of fell into that. His parents, Monty and Harriet, owned an orange grove in a ranch in California, and he went to school in Fullerton, California. Fullerton, by the way, is not too far away from Anaheim. It's southeast of Los Angeles. When he was eight years old, Leo lost his left eye. He got a glass eyes a replacement. One biography I read said that he lost his eye do to an injury that he suffered in childhood. Another one said that he had actually developed a tumor behind that. I uh, I don't know which was the actual cause, but I do mention it because him losing an eye actually plays an important part in his story, beyond just coping with you know this this change, uh it actually is. You could argue the fact that he lost an eye when he was a kid might have been what made it possible for him to get into making electric guitars. He also attended Junior College in Fullerton. He majored in accounting, and in fact, he had no formal training and electrical engineering at all, but he did have a very keen interest in the subject, and much of that interest actually came from working with his uncle, whose name is John West or was John West West was an auto mechanic, and he also had built his own radio, and he was interested in ham radio. So Fender became fascinated with radios and began to learn how they work, and how do you build a simple radio, how are more complex radios built, how do you repair them? And He got so good at putting radios together or figuring out how to fix a broken radio that he ended up opening out a small business in his home while he was still in high school. He had a little home shop he would work in and just kind of take commissions from locals to build or fix radios. He took piano lessons as a kid, uh, and later he switched to the saxophone briefly, but music really wasn't his passion, at least not not producing it himself, so he never learned to play guitar, and legend hasn't that he didn't even really know how to tune a guitar properly. When he graduated in nineteen thirty the country was in pretty bad shape. The Great Depression had begun the previous year, and so it was a tough time for people to get work and to keep work. Fender originally found work with a company called the Consolidated Ice and Cold Storage Company in Anaheim, California, which sounds like a pretty cool gig. That's a pun. In nineteen thirty four, he married a woman named Esther class Key. They would stay together until she passed away. Uh. He also switched jobs to work for the California Highway Department in California, obviously, but government budgets would lead to layoffs and his job was one of the ones affected. He was one of the people who was let go during that that era. So he went around looked for another job, and he got one as an accountant for a tire company, but that job only lasted six months before the tire company also had to layoff employees, including Fenders. So while that was going on, he was still pursuing his interest with electronics. You know, it wasn't working in that field, but we're still interested in it. A local band leader in Fullerton had asked Fender to build out a p A system, a public address system, so that it could be used for dances. And these were dances that were taking place in clubs and dance halls in Hollywood. So Fender took the job and he built out the p A system, and the guy was impressed and it ended up leading to some other commission work. And once he lost his position at the tire company, when he was no longer able to be there accountant, he decided he was going to take a risk and go into business for himself. I mean after all, he had gone through three different jobs over the past few years and felt that maybe it was time for him to try and do this on his own. Also, by this time it was nineteen thirty nine. It was almost a decade after he had graduated, and nine nine is sort of the end of the Great Depression. The Great Depression, the major downturn was in the first few years, like twenty nine to thirty three, and then thirty nine was towards the very end of the recovery period where the economy was finally getting to the point of pre depression levels. So Fender took out a loan for six hundred dollars and he set up a company, a little store called the Fender Radio Service. It was a repair shop in Fullerton, California. He specialized in repairing small electronic products like radios, amplifiers, public address systems, but also like phonograph some other stuff like that. He began to carry records after a while, as in vinyl albums, because he saw that there was a market for it and there weren't really any record shops in Fullerton, so he said, well, you know, I sell this equipment. I offered to repair this equipment I should sell the media as well, so he did, and that started bringing more customers in, and then he began to carry other types of products like phonographs and and actually sell a lot more radios. Originally he was just repairing them, and over time he built out public address systems and offered them for rental or for sale. There were still a lot of local dances and banned performances going on in the area, and so that ended up being kind of a regular source of income for him. Then he began to build amplifiers, and again he had received no formal schooling in any of this. He was learning by doing. He was learning by tinkering in his shop, putting things together, seeing if they worked, adjusting them. It was very interesting to see that this guy was largely self taught, so he had developed his expertise through experience and through studying what other people had built and figuring out how it worked. At this point, America was entering World War Two, in fact that it did so after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that happened in December. Fender, however, was ineligible to be conscripted for military service because he had lost an eye. He had a glass eye, and it was in this period when he would first start working with developing electric guitars. So you could argue that it's possible Fender was able to pursue his interest in electronics and to start fiddling around with working on electric guitars because he had lost his eye as a kid, and if he hadn't, he would have been conscripted for the United States military and sent to fight in World War Two, and who knows what would have happened. Then maybe he would have come out of it fine, but he might not have taken on a job that would have involved electronics after coming back from the war, So it's an interesting thing to think about. In the early nineteen forties, Finder began to work with one of his regular customers, who is a guy who also owned a radio repair shop. That guy was Clayton Doc Kaufman. Kaufman had brought an amplifier for Finder to fix at one point, and the two struck up a friendship. Doc Kaufman had already made some important contributions to music himself. In ninety eight, he applied for a patent. That patent has the title Apparatus for producing Tremolo Effects or tremolo effects if you prefer tremolo is a wavering effecting whoo boo in a musical tone. And so this was a patent for a type of tremolo bar sometimes called a whammy bar. More appropriately we should call it a vibrato bridge. That's the lever that some electric guitars and some other instruments have that that the purpose of that lever is to introduce this wavering effect. And Kaufman designed a movable tail piece that would increase or decrease the tension on a string. So when you'd string this musical instrument, and it would go through to the bridge at the base of the musical instrument, this bar had a little spring loaded system connected to that bridge where if you press down on the bar, it would increase tension on the strings, which would increase the pitch of the string. When it was vibrating, it would actually vibrate at a faster frequency. If you pulled up on the lever, it would reduce the amount of tension on the string and it would vibrate more slowly and thus decrease the pitch of the vibrating string. Uh So, moving the lever either closer to or further from the face of the instrument. You can slightly change the tension of the string without having to change the tuning, and that's where you get that wavering sound. And um, this is where I need to make that pedantic clarification. Technically speaking, you create a tremolo effect by changing the amplitude of a sound, by changing the volume of a sound, by moving the volume up and down over time, mike, so kind of like turning up and turning down the volume rapidly as a note plays. That's technically tremolo. Vibrato is changed by uh, is that wavering effect by changing the pitch slightly of a sound, so the frequency, not the amplitude. And that's what these these apparatus would do. They change the pitch of the of the string, and so they were That's why we should call him vibrato, not tremolo. But everyone calls him tremolo or wammy bars, so it doesn't really matter. I guess it ultimately matters what people use as the term, but technically speaking, it's not correct. Kaufman had also worked with the company Rickenbacker, which was the company that had pioneered electric guitars, though these were meant to be lap steel electric guitars. Uh. And they were hollow body guitars. They weren't solid body guitars, so they weren't the Spanish style guitars we typically think of. Those are the ones that you know, you would typically have a shoulder strap on them and you play it standing up. Uh. The lap steel guitars, obviously, as the name suggests, those you would play you would sit down. You would have the guitar sitting on your lab and you play it as a steel guitar. Kaufman and Fender worked together to design a phonograph record changer, and they were able to sell that design for the Burnsley some of five thousand dollars, and with that they decided to go into business together and started a new company. They called it K and F Manufacturing. Fender continued to operate his radio repair shop at the same time, and then the moment of truth. At some point, Kaufman and Fender began to discuss the systems that made electric guitars work, and the too decide they were going to give it a shot. What happened next, I'll tell you right after we take this quick break to thank our sponsor Now, the part of an electric guitar that makes it electric ultimately is the pickup. There's some other circuitry that's also technically connected to pickups for most electric guitars, but the pickup is really the element at play. And I talked a bit about these quite a bit actually in the Gibson episodes, but I'm gonna go over it again here because it is in fact the important element of any electric uh stringed instrument. And besides, fenders, pickups are different from the pickups that Gibson used. Now, the pickup is the part of an electric guitar that creates the electric signal that can ultimately be sent out to an amplifier and then on two speakers. And there are two prevailing theories about what is going on with pickups, and they're very similar, but there is a slight distinction between the two. Both of the theories say that basically the electric guitar pickups work because of electromagnetism. That is absolutely the case. It has to be. The pickup has one or more permanent magnets with a coil of copper wire wrapped around the magnets on a frame that we call the bobbin. The purpose of the bobbin is to keep the coil stationary with respect to the body of the guitar, and a typical bobbin, if you're looking at your average electric guitar, has a base plate that attaches to the guitar body by some way, typically by screws. You have a little plate that screws into the face of the guitar and that sits as the base that then holds the magnets in place. And then you have a top plate that fits on top of those magnets, and then this acts as the frame around which you can wind the copper coil. Some pickups, like the ones Fender would use in the Strato caster, have an individual cylindrical magnet under each of the six strings, so each string has its own little cylinder underneath it that is a magnet um. They look like little poles when you take them out of the pickup. Other pickups might have a bar magnet. The Gibson P ninety pickup has is a bar magnet pickup. Rick and Bocker had horseshoe magnets for some of their pickups, but we often see these individual cylindrical magnets in most electric guitar pickups, I would say at least the ones that Fender made. Anyway, electric guitars have metal strings as well, and those strings are made out of nickel and steel. Those are feral magnetic materials. That means those metals are attracted to magnets. If you stick a magnet to a guitar string, you'll feel that there's that connection, right, that they're attracted to each other. The prevailing explanation about how pickups work says that strumming a string causes it to disrupt the magnetic field around the pickup, and that in turn induces current to flow through the coil technically and induces a difference in voltage, which then causes current to flow through the coil. That current can be sent out to an amplifier and then boosted to go to speakers which play this back. They convert that electric signal back into an analog physical uh sound, right, the the speakers convert that electric signal into physical movement. That then we can hear that physical movement being the movement of the drivers inside the speaker. But then there's a secondary explanation. It gets a little more precise, and this is one that's put forth by organizations like the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It goes a little further. That theory states the strings themselves become magnetized because they're so close to a permanent magnet and they are ferro magnetic material. So maybe you've done the little experiment where you take something like a needle and um, it's made of a ferro magnetic material, and you rub the needle several times against a permanent magnet, and then you move the needle over some other ferro magnetic material, maybe other needles or pins, and it picks them up. It's kind of like that. So according to this explanation, when you strum a string, you're really moving a magnet quickly near a coil of conductive wire, which is the basis of electric motors and dynamos. Right like you you have conductive wire and a permanent magnet, and when you move the two in relation to each other, it's the same as having a fluctuating magnetic field near a conductive wire, and that again induces that change in voltage and current to flow. Whether you subscribe to the first explanation or you say no, no, no, this second one is much more correct. Because of that magnetic strings explanation, the result is the same. The result is that strumming a string causes this electrical signal to pass through the pickup and then move on ultimately through the output jack on an electric instrument. Now, I'll talk more about pickups and how they play a part with harmonics later on in these episodes, because that's a very important element in what differentiates a stratocaster from say a less Paul Gibson guitar. I was during that first year of K and F manufacturing when the two founders produced their first electric guitar. Typically it's referred to as the Radio Shop guitar. It was a prototype is just meant to prove be a proof of concept to make sure that they could do this. They were working with a very different pickup design. This one was one in which the guitar strings would actually pass through the magnetic coil. And this was very hard for me to visualize, but fortunately there are are uh pictures. There's there's illustrations from the patent application for this thing. So I pulled those to take a look at them, and one of those illustrations shows that the guitar has a kind of a raised frame that is is attached to the face of the guitar. Think of it's like a it's almost like a little raised box that's on the face of the guitar, and the strings can pass under the top of that box and out the other side. Because the box itself on the center, it looks kind of like it's hollow. In reality, that boxes housing the pickup, so the strings are just passing through the pickup, not overtop the pickup as it would in a normal electric guitar. And the reason that Fender and Kaufman did this was that they said it would produce notes with greater fidelity. You would have less interference, less less of a kind of crunchy sound. You would be able to hear each note much more clearly and distinctly, so you would get a clear, chiming kind of note instead of more of, uh, a high gain kind of sound. This is also where he gets really complicated to try and explain the differences in sound, because we don't necessarily have very quantitative ways of describing them, but they are certainly you can when you hear it, you can definitely tell the difference. Well, this radio shop guitar was again improof of concept. They did not plan to go forward and make more of these and sell them, but they would use it as the basis for a Hawaiian style lap steel guitar, and they started selling those. They also started building and selling vacuum tube amplifiers and they did that for three years. But by nine six, World War two had come to an end, and Kaufman was nervous. He thought this fledgling company wouldn't be able to survive in a post war environment, and that there was gonna be way too much competition, and that there weren't weren't enough customers to go around, so he was afraid he would lose his shirt, so he decided to bow out. But he and Fender would remain friends for the rest of their lives, so there were no hard feelings. But he needed to He felt like he wasn't really sure this was the right thing for him. Fender, however, would stick with it, and he renamed the company the Fender Manufacturing Company. And this tends to be when most company histories for Fender guitars say this is the birth, the nineteen forty six that's the real beginning for Fender. Now there's no official documentation to verify the story I'm about to say, but the general belief is that the first guitar to ever have the Fender f logo on it, which is a famous trademark now, it was a custom lap steel guitar Fender UH and it was built for Leo Fender's friend Noel Boggs in nineteen six. Boggs was a steel guitarist lap lap guitar player. He he took inspiration from a jazz guitarist named Charlie Christian. Charlie Christian actually helped make Gibson guitars famous. He was using a Gibson electric guitar and that was a hollow body Gibson electric guitar that that Christian was using, and he was popularizing this concept of electric guitars. Boggs like the sound of the Fender guitars, so he started to take the sound of the Fender guitars and the technique of Christian and incorporate that. And it was interesting, you know. Charlie Christian he worked in the jazz genre of music, whereas Noel Boggs was more of a country and Western musician. But he started to take some of those techniques from jazz music and incorporated into western and that's sort of helped really push a genre called Western swing. Boggs was not the only person doing this, but he he really was one of the pioneers of that genre. It was around this time when an old friend Offenders named Don Randall played a real important part. Randall had once worked for a radio supply shop called Howard Taylor Wholesale Radio and that I had often worked with Fenders Radio repair shop, and then in Randall went and bought the store he worked for, but he ended up selling off that business once he got drafted for World War Two, and in World War two he served in the Army UH For a while he was part of the Army Corps of Engineers, and then later on he was part of the Army Air Corps, which would of course later evolve into the Air Force. When Randall got out of military service in nineteen forty six, he got back into the radio business as a manager for a shop called Radiotel T E. L. And Randall convinced the shop's owner F. C. Hall and his friend Leo Fender that they should form a partnership that Radio Hotel should become a distributor for the guitars and amplifiers that Leo Finn There was building. Randall would become a salesman in charge of this account, and much of Fender's early success can be traced to Randall's management of sales and distributions. So Leo was making good products, but Randall was the one who was marketing and selling them, so together that partnership really helped cement Fender in the world of music UH. This would allow Randall to kind of scale things up gradually. He first started concentrating on local sales, and later that moved into regional sales, and eventually it moved into national sales, so he was able to help grow the business quite a bit. Fender would relocate his manufacturing facility to a larger factory in Fullerton, and he decided to officially make the design and manufacturing of instruments his primary focus. He would hand off supervision of the service shop the radio repair shop in ninety seven to a guy named Dale Hyatt, and then the shop at self would end up closing in nineteen fifty one, and the music company would become the only UH focus for Leo Fender. At that point, it still seems odd to me that he never learned to play guitar, but that fact did not stop him. He would create designs and then he tested them by asking musicians in the Fullerton area to try out his instruments and his amplifiers and to give him notes um to give him feedback. Man, it's hard to do this without puns. He asked them for their opinions about the equipment he made, and then he would go back and he would tweak those designs. He formed a lot of friendships with people in the music scene around Los Angeles and Anaheim, and there were quite a few at that time. And then uh Fender guitars became known for their really clean tones. The patented pickup really made a big difference. By the end of nineteen forty six or right around the beginning of nineteen Fender decided to rename his company again and he called it the Fender Electric instru Ments Company. Most of his clients in the nineteen forties were creating Western swing music. That was music that Leo Finder himself really liked. But Finder was starting to get the desire to create a Spanish style guitar. In addition to the lap steel guitars he was known for. Gibson had made some arch top electric jazz guitars, but Gibson had not yet produced a solid body electric guitar, and Finder thought he might be able to do that. Um So acoustic guitars, by the way, they typically have a hollow body that acts as a resonant chamber so that sound can resonate inside of it, and they have sound holes. The sound holes helped project sound from acoustic instruments and allow that that sound that's resonating out to create the tone that you want from that acoustic guitar. But electric instruments don't need a resonant chamber. They can have one, but they don't need one. The vibration of the strings creates the frequencies that are converted into electric signals, and that's all you need because then you can amplify those and send them on speakers, so you can create a solid body electric instrument with no hollow compartment at all. Les Paul is the guy we typically point to as the inventor of the solid body electric guitar. He experimented with some really wonky stuff early on, like a two foot section of rail from a discarded pile near railroad tracks. He paired that with a microphone from an old telephone and discovered that he could isolate the sound of hearing just the string vibrating if he plugged the string. The strings vibrations we're the only thing he could pick up. And that's exactly what he wanted. He wanted this isolation of sound. And he also found that the sustain on that note would go for a ridiculously long time, so you could hear a note played for a really long time if it was played on electric instrument. So in one he would go on to create an actual guitar from a four by four and made out of pine and he built in some homemade pickups. He called it the log. He would later fit that very odd looking guitar with some decorative wings designed to look like an epiphone guitar so it would look more like a regular guitar because as a log, people would just take a look at and they're like, oh, that's a that's a toy or something. It's not real. And it was only after he made it look like a quote unquote real guitar that people started to take notice. He had tried to take that idea to Gibson, but the company was not totally eager to jump on board at that time, so Fender decided it was time for him to give it a shot. And I'll tell you how that turned out in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Fender's first solid body guitar was a Spanish style guitar he called the Esquire. The Esquire had a single pickup. It was located near the bridge of the guitar. The bridge, of course, is the anchor point at the base of the guitar's body, so it's the it's the part closest to where you would strum, so that's where you put the bridge. And Fender had made a prototype in the prototype had pine wood for the body. He actually took two slabs of pine wood and essentially glued them together. And in fact, the earliest Esquires aren't technically solid body guitars. They actually are slightly hollow. If you tap on one of those very very early Esquires, you're gonna hear that hollow sound. That was probably in order to help manage how heavy the guitars were, but he would later change the actual production models of the Esquire to be made out of swamp ash instead of pine, which was a much lighter wood, and that meant that he didn't have to have this hollow compartment at all, and they were true solid bodies. He also shaped the body with design that we'd call it cutaway. That's these curved designs you see on on guitars where they get these really kind of sleek, almost sort of pointed sections. The whole purpose for that actually is to create enough room so that a guitarist can have easier access to the upper frets. You know, when they're doing there their high notes, they want to be able to get their hands in there, and the cutaways remove some of that barrier. Unlike the elevated pickups Fender had used in those earlier lap steel guitars, the Esquire had its pickup under the strings, with an individual poll piece for each of the strings. So it wasn't that weird, I shouldn't say weird innovative design where the pickups were actually mounted to the face where the strings passed through. It was underneath the face of the guitar, so um, it wasn't in the way. The kind of pickup it was is a single coil pickup. That means all the poll pieces were surrounded by the same coil of copper wire wrapped around the pubbin and the neck. The Esquire was made from maple, so you had a swamp ash body and a maple neck, and the neck connected to the body of the guitar using an anchor plate held in place by four screws. And that type of construction is called a bolton. It's a bolt on neck guitar, and it's one of several ways that Fender guitars differ from Gibson guitars. Gibson's have necks that are glued into the body of their guitars, so they don't use the boltons. Fenders started to manufacture the Esquire in the spring of nineteen fifty. It appeared in Fender's catalog and you could purchase it for just a hundred thirty nine dollars and nine cents. However, we had just that for inflation, that would mean that it would cost about a thousand, four hundred eighty eight dollars today, not ridiculous for a Fender guitar. Actually fift dollars right in line for a Fender guitar. If you're to and that's if you're looking at a new one, not a Fender guitar, that's a vintage classic guitar. Those can be in the tens of thousands of dollars, depending upon the make and model. While the original Esquire only had one pickup, Thender began offering versions that had two pickups, and the second one was closer to the neck of the guitar, and so you had one pickup that was at the base right near the bridge, and one that was near the neck, so kind of spanning the space where you would strum. He also created a variation of it. They used a trust rod to stabilize the neck of the guitar. Now, trust rod is typically a steel rod that actually is nested inside the neck of a guitar, and the reason that you would include a trust rod is to provide that stability to counteract the tendency of a wooden neck of a guitar to slowly start curving inward over time because it's constantly under tension from guitar strings, so it's kind of like a brace in a way. The variation of the Esquire that had two pickups and a trust rod got a new name. It was called a new type of guitar, and that name originally was the Fender Broadcaster. But there was another company called Gretch, an American music company that made a drum kit that already had the name Broadcaster. So Gretch reaches out the Fender and says, hey, um, not cool man, we already have a Broadcaster products were got. We don't want to have confusion in the marketplace. This is a ninette. So Leo Fenders like, you know what, You're right, you got a point. So they dropped the name from the guitars, so they sold some that were under the brand name Broadcaster. Then for the next run of those guitars, they didn't have a new name yet, so some Fender fans referred to the guitars that were made. There were two single coil pickup guitars with the trust rod. They said, all right, well, since they weren't Broadcasters anymore, we're calling them no Casters because there's no name to them. And then after that, Leo came up with a new name for the design, called the Telecaster. So Broadcasters, no Casters, and telecasters are all essentially the same type of guitar. Keep in mind, Leo kept on making little tweaks to the guitar design over time, so there are differences even between a Teleca, an early Telecaster, and a later Telecaster. Now, the Fender Telecaster became the first commercially successful solid body guitar. The Esquire would continue to be available, mostly originally because Fender was hoping he would use that to target a lower cost electric guitar musician market because it only had the one pickup, so it costs less than the Telecaster did. But then other cheaper electric guitars would later fill that niche There would be other single pickup electric guitars that would come in that would be much cheaper than the Esquire. But there were still many musicians who actually favored the Esquire itself because of the sounds it produced. They said, well, it's not because it's cheaper. It's uh, I know that the Telecasters out there, but the Esquire makes the sound I want. So it would continue in production for several years even though uh. From from a technical perspective, if you're looking at well, it has fewer features than future models of guitars, you would say, well, now it's obsolete, you should discontinue it. Much earlier but musical instruments are different. Some musicians say, no, this is exactly the sound I need. Let's talk a little bit about the sound of the Esquire and the sound of the telecaster and some of the ways that pick ups and switches and tone controls lead to that different sound. First, as I mentioned earlier, the pickup doesn't lead directly to the output jack. There were some more wiring between the pickup and the jack that allows a musician to get the tone that he or she wants. So with the Esquire, that included a three way switch, a volume knob, and a tone knob. So what do those actually do? Well, if you had a guitar with multiple pickups, the switch would normally let you switch between which pickups you were using to generate that outgoing signal. Right, So if you have a guitar that's got two pickups and you have a two position switch, it makes sense, alright, one position is for one pickup, the other positions for the other pickup. But this was a guitar that only had a single pickup. Why would you need a three position switch? And while it was considered to be more of a tone shaper, if you put the switch into position one, it would route the signal so that would only go to the volume control. The tone control knob wouldn't do anything if you had the esquare switch to position one, so this would control the amplitude of the signal sent out to the amplifier. Position two for the esquire would route the signal to both the tone and the volume controls, and that would create a sound that most people describe as being warmer than what you got. If you were had the switch in position one. Position three would again and the signal only to the volume control. It would bypass tone control, but would also go through a circuit with a special capacitor and a resistor network in it. That circuit was meant to suppress signals that represented frequencies and the trouble range of the guitar, creating what some would call a dark tone. So you wouldn't turn this knob and get start generating trouble. What you do is you turn the knob the other way, and what you're doing is you're you're suppressing trouble. You're taking some of those higher frequencies and you're suppressing them. And it's easy to do because you just suppress the parts of the electrical signal that represent those frequencies, So the switch would let the bass sounds play through with more volume, and Finder may have meant for this to let guitar players use their guitars kind of like a proto electric bass guitar. We'll talk more about bass guitars in our next episode. Tone knobs, by the way, are essentially potentialometers. Tone knobs are a bit more of a precise way to achieve what position three on the Esquire switch would do. You can do what's called rolling off the trouble on a guitar. So if you said a tone knob at ten, then your outgoing signal should represent all the frequencies your guitar strings are producing and the pickup is detecting. But sometimes that means you get a sound that has sort of a harsh or shrill quality to it. So you can dial that back, you can turn down that knob, and that increases resistance for those frequencies. Let's less of those frequencies through to the amplifier and thus to the speakers, and it can mellow out sounds, it can make them lower and darker and suppress that higher, shriller sound, and it's uh, kind of interesting. Like I've seen demonstrations of this, and you can when you know what's happening and you're really listening, you can you can definitely tell the difference. It's not like it's just you know, an illusion or it's wishful thinking. It really does change the tone of music. Amplifiers, by the way, also have controls like this, so you can actually really shape the way a guitar sounds by working not just with the controls on the guitar, but also the controls on the amplifier you're using. So some musicians prefer to keep the tone on their guitar set and never touch it again, and then they just deal with the tone controls on an amplifier and uh, they that's how they prefer to do it. In that way, they don't ever have to mess with their guitar controls. Others like to be able to control the way a guitar sounds in mid performance, you know, switch from one kind of sound to another while still using the same instrument. And it's easier to do that if you can just quickly adjust to control that's on the guitar itself. So it all depends on what you wanted to sound. Now I'm getting pretty far into this, so in our next episode, I'm going to start off by talking about how the telecaster change things up and having to pickups and how that changes the sound. And we'll also talk about how the Fender guitar helped usher in a new genre of music. In the early nineteen fifties, Fender was making guitars mostly for Western swing bands and big bands. These were really large ensembles where electric guitars have become a necessity because if you had a guitar in your group, the only way you're going to hear it is if you had some form of amplification, because otherwise the instrument was just too soft to hear over the rest of the instruments, and putting a microphone in front of an acoustic guitar sometimes would create a lot of feedback and other distortion issues that just made the sound not very pleasing to the ear. So the electric guitar almost rose out of necessity. But this innovation was also saying the stage for a new type of band, one with fewer instruments that create a louder sound, and the telecaster would help pave the way. I'll tell you more about that in our next episode. For now, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, why don't you send me a message. You can write me at the email address text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. 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