Curiously, it would not look like musicians have been the ones who dreamed up the thought of an electrified instrument. Fairly, it was the legions of amateur tinkerers who started taking aside products like the telephone, radio, and phonograph and seeing what they may do. A few of the makes use of they imagined now seem bizarre. A 1919 journal advert offered a device for amplifying sounds, which, it talked about, may very well be used to amplify a violin—or to spy on people. Another magazine from 1922 touted an amateur-constructed “radio violin” : primarily a stick to a string and a cellphone pickup linked to an amp and a steel horn. “Weak tones will be amplified by a radio loudspeaker,” the caption explained. Later that decade, quite a lot of proto-rock-‘n’-rollers discovered that by shoving a phonograph needle into the top of their acoustic guitar, they could get sound … Read the rest