SOME THINGS WERE INVENTED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. With others, the motivation is less clear. Consider, for example, the electric guitar. When guitarists first crudely electrified their instruments in the 1920s, what were they trying to do? Why change something that had been successful for hundreds of years? Could they have envisioned that the instrument that inspired some of Vivaldi’s and Boccherini’s most beautiful compositions would one day be used by Motörhead and blink-182?

In fact, the driving force behind the invention of the electric guitar was simply the search for a louder sound, a desire that had existed long before the development of electronic amplifiers and speakers in the 1920s. As musical performances moved to increasingly large public spaces over the course of the nineteenth century, the sizes of ensembles grew correspondingly, and musicians needed more volume. For this and other reasons, Americans had been making innovations in guitar design since before the Civil War.

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