Electric Chili

Being an engineer, I can’t help but enjoy digging into the origins of things we take for granted today.  I like to pay a little homage to the inventors who came before us.  With that being said, let’s take a look at magnetic pickups.  It seems that magnetic pickups were first invented for the purpose of improving record players.  The pickups would “pick up” the variations of the needle as it tracked the record.  This needle would move within a magnet field and generate a current.   It wasn’t until 1932 that a patent for a magnetic pickup appears in the patent record for an “Electrical Device Musical Instruments”.  The inventors name was Armond F. Knoblaugh.  It appears that although he is credited with the patent, he was working for Baldwin.  This is pretty typical in the engineering world.  The inventor is credited but the patent actually belongs to the company they work for.

He kept it general enough so that it applies to all musical instruments but the illustrations in his patent primarily show the the strings of a piano plate which makes sense for a Baldwin engineer.

Let’s hear a little from Armond about his invention…

My invention relates to the class of instruments in which the mechanical vibrations of strings or like members are transformed into electrical vibrations, which are amplified and 5 converted into sound by a loud speaker or the like. In a co-pending application, Serial No. 581,416, filed December 16, 1931, I have described a series of individual magnets which give excellent results. In the present 10 invention, I have made magnets, each in connection with a plurality of strings, that taper in substantially the same ratio as the lengths of the strings.

The first reference that I could find where the pickup was used for something that resembled a guitar was in 1934.  Check out that photo to the left.  Not a real “looker” but you get the idea.  It has the basic shape of a guitar that we’re familiar with and even has six strings.  This was patented by G. D. Beauchamp who was the cofounder of Electro Stinged Instrument Corporation. 

G. D. Beauchamp was also one of the founders of Rickenbacker Guitars.  He later went on to develop a patent for electric guitars in 1937.  If you do a little patent searching you’ll see that that is the time when patents for different types of electric guitars began.  That’s how it works in the patent world.  If someone can find a little different way of doing something they can get a patent of the own.  For example, if I think the pickup works better at the neck than at the bridge, I can apply for a new patent.  If I come up with a design that offers flexibility on what pickup I use, a new patent is born.

So now that the whole Magnetic Pickup is out of the bag, so to speak, patents start to come hot and heavy.  Gibson joins the party in 1939, Radio Corp  and Gibson again in 1941, and Radio Corp again in 1944.  If you wondering who the heck is Radio Corp, just think radio and Marconi.  They designed and manufactured radio equipment and ultimately were bought out by GE.

In the 1944 Radio Corp patent you can see that even improving something is enough to get you a new patent. 

In this application I disclose an improved method and means for obtaining a greater range of timbre in an electronic musical instrument, using mechanical vibrators such as strings, reeds, rods, plates, bars, membranes, etc.

This patent shows how the inclusion of capacitors and inductors can affect the response of the pickups.  The artwork shows the locations of these passive elements but in typical Patent form, doesn’t show you the values or the frequency plots that show you exactly how it improves it.  But anyway, I digress. 

So, there you go.  Magnetic Pickups go back quite a ways in our history.  We haven’t talked about the difference between the single coil and the humbucker but will certainly get to that in another post.