Leo Fender

Clarence Leonidas Fender (August 10, 1909 – March 21, 1991) was an American inventor and founder of the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.

Fender designed the company's iconic early instruments: the Fender Telecaster, the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar; the Fender Stratocaster, among the most iconic electric guitars; and the Fender Precision Bass, which set the standard for electric basses.

He also designed the Fender Bassman amplifier, which became the archetype for later amplifiers (notably by Marshall and Mesa Boogie) that dominated rock and roll music.

Clarence Leonidas Fender was born on August 10, 1909, to Clarence Monte Fender and Harriet Elvira Wood, owners of a successful orange grove located between Anaheim and Fullerton, California.

At the age of eight, Fender developed a tumor in his left eye, resulting in the eye being removed and being replaced with a glass eye, making him ineligible for the draft in World War II later in life.

As a youth, Fender played piano and saxophone before his interests shifted toward electronics.

When he was 14, Fender visited his uncle's automotive-electric shop in Santa Maria, and was fascinated by a radio his uncle had built from spare parts.

Soon thereafter, Fender began repairing radios in a small shop in his parents' home.

In 1928, Fender graduated from Fullerton Union High School, and entered Fullerton Junior College as an accounting major, though he continued to work with electronics.

After college, Fender worked as an ice delivery man and later bookkeeper.

Around this time, he was approached by a local bandleader asking him to build six public address systems for use in Hollywood dance halls.

In 1938, with a borrowed $600, Fender and his wife Esther returned to Fullerton, and started his own radio repair shop, Fender Radio Service.

Soon, musicians and band leaders began coming to him for public address systems, which he built, rented, and sold.

They also visited his store for amplification for the amplified acoustic guitars that were beginning to show up on the southern California music scene—in big band and jazz music, and for the electric "Hawaiian" or "lap steel" guitars becoming popular in country music.

During World War II, Fender met Clayton Orr "Doc" Kauffman, an inventor and lap steel player who had worked for Rickenbacker, which had been building and selling lap steel guitars for a decade.

While with Rickenbacker, Kauffman had invented the "Vibrola" tailpiece, a precursor to the later vibrato tailpiece.

Fender convinced him that they should team up, and they started the "K&F Manufacturing Corporation" to design and build amplified Hawaiian guitars and amplifiers.

Pickup-equipped archtops were the guitars of choice in the dance bands of the late 1940s, but the increasing popularity of roadhouses and dance halls created a growing need for louder, cheaper, and more durable instruments.

Players also needed "faster" necks and better intonation to play what the country players called "take-off lead guitar."

In the late 1940s, solid-body electric guitars began to rise in popularity, yet they were still considered novelty items, with the Rickenbacker Spanish Electro guitar being the most commercially available solid-body, and Les Paul's one-off home-made "Log" and the Bigsby Travis guitar made by Paul Bigsby for Merle Travis being the most visible early examples.

Fender recognized the potential for an electric guitar that was easy to hold, tune, and play, and would not feed back at dance hall volumes as the typical archtop would.

In 1944, Fender and Kauffman patented a lap steel guitar with an electric pickup already patented by Fender.

In 1945, they began selling the guitar in a kit with an amplifier designed by K&F.

In 1946, Doc pulled out of K&F and Fender revised the company and renamed it "Fender Manufacturing", and then later "Fender Electric Instrument Co."

at the end of 1947 and he handed over the reins of his radio shop to Dale Hyatt.

As the Big Bands fell out of vogue towards the end of World War II, small combos playing boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, western swing, and honky-tonk formed throughout the United States.

Many of these outfits embraced the electric guitar because it could give a few players the power of an entire horn section.

In 1948, he finished the prototype of a thin solid-body electric; the first one-pickup model was released in 1950 as the Fender Esquire, while a two-pickup version, initially called the Broadcaster but renamed the Telecaster after a trademark issue, was released the year after.

The Telecaster became one of the most popular electric guitars in history.

Instead of updating the Telecaster, Fender decided, based on customer feedback, to leave the Telecaster as it was and design a new, upscale solid-body guitar to sell alongside the basic Telecaster.

Western swing guitarist Bill Carson was one of the chief critics of the Telecaster, stating that the new design should have individually adjustable bridge saddles, four or five pickups, a vibrato unit that could be used in either direction and return to proper tuning, and a contoured body for enhanced comfort over the slab-body Telecaster's harsh edges.

Fender, assisted by draftsman Freddie Tavares, began designing the Stratocaster in late 1953.

It included a rounder, less "club-like" neck (at least for the first year of issue) and a double cutaway for easier reach to the upper registers.

Another novelty to the Stratocaster design included the use of three pickups wired to offer three different voicings, two of which could be further tailored by the player by adjusting the two tone controls.

This was the first electric guitar on the market to offer three pickups and a tremolo arm (which was actually used for vibrato, not tremolo), which became widely used by guitarists.

The three pickups could be selected using the standard three-way switch to give the guitar different sound and options by using the "neck", "middle" or "bridge" pickups.

Though Fender preferred the sound of single pickups, guitarists discovered they could get the switch to stay between the detent positions and activate two pickups at once.

The five-way switch was finally implemented as a factory option in late 1976, adding the detent combinations of neck+middle or bridge+middle that musicians had been using for years.

During this time, Fender also tackled the problems experienced by players of the acoustic double bass, who could no longer compete for volume with the other musicians.

Fender, who was not a guitarist himself, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.