The history
5,000 years from a lute on a clay seal to the electric guitar, the dreadnought and the Indian slide guitar.
For thousands of years, people have stretched strings along a neck over a hollow body and pressed them to change the note. The guitar took its shape in Spain, gained a sixth string in Italy, and got its modern body from Antonio de Torres and C. F. Martin. Then players wanted to be louder: steel strings, metal cones and finally magnets and coils turned the guitar electric, and from Hawaii to India, musicians kept reinventing it.
c. 3100 BCE
Oldest known picture of a lute
Cylinder seal, Mesopotamia
1536
First printed book of vihuela music
Luys Milán, Spain
1596
First known guitar treatise in Europe
Joan Carles Amat, Spain
1779
Earliest surviving six-string guitar (widely considered)
Gaetano Vinaccia, Italy
1932
First commercially successful electric guitar
Rickenbacker Frying Pan, USA
1950
First mass-produced solid-body electric guitar
Fender Esquire and Broadcaster, USA
1959
Hum-cancelling guitar pickup patented
Seth Lover, Gibson, USA
Call of the Valley, 1967
First Indian musician to play ragas on the guitar
Brij Bhushan Kabra, India
3100 BCE – 1500
Long-necked lutes appear in Mesopotamia, and the oud travels with Arab rulers to Spain, where the guitar story begins.
3100 BCE
c. 3100 BCE or earlier
A cylinder seal in the British Museum, dated to about 3100 BCE or earlier, seems to show a woman playing a long-necked lute. The idea is simple: strings stretched along a neck over a hollow body. Press a string against the neck and it plays a higher note.
Why it mattered. Every guitar still works this way: a string, a neck to shorten it, and a body to make it louder.
850
9th century (attributed)
After 711, Arab and Berber rulers brought the oud, a round-backed lute, to al-Andalus in Spain. The musician Ziryab (789–857) is said to have added a fifth string to his oud and founded a music school there. Spain became one of the doors through which the lute entered Europe.
Why it mattered. The guitar grew up in Spain, alongside the lute family that the oud brought there.
1500 – 1780
Spain’s vihuela and the five-course baroque guitar use pairs of strings. Handbooks teach people to strum chords, and even Stradivari builds guitars.
1536
The vihuela had a flat, waisted body like a guitar and six pairs of strings, tuned like a lute. In 1536 Luys Milán published El Maestro, the first printed collection of music for it. Players pressed the strings against frets on the neck to pick out each note.
Why it mattered. The guitar shape and the idea of frets for every note were already in place 500 years ago.
1596
1596 (first edition lost)
Joan Carles Amat wrote a treatise on the five-course Spanish guitar, first printed in 1596. That edition is lost; the oldest surviving copy was printed in Lleida in 1626. It is considered the first known guitar treatise in Europe.
Why it mattered. It taught ordinary people to strum chords, which helped the guitar spread far beyond the court.
1674
Gaspar Sanz published a big method for the five-course baroque guitar in 1674. It mixed strummed pieces (rasgueado) with plucked ones (punteado), from courtly dances to popular tunes. It became the most complete baroque guitar method.
Why it mattered. Guitarists still play Sanz today, and still switch between strumming and picking.
1700
The famous violin maker also built guitars with five pairs of strings. The Rawlins, made in 1700, is one of only a handful of Stradivari guitars that survive; another, the Sabionari of 1679, can still be played. The Rawlins is kept at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota.
Why it mattered. The best instrument makers of the age treated the guitar as worth their finest work.
1779 – 1892
Six single strings arrive, and makers learn to brace thin tops: fans in Torres’s Spain, an X at Martin’s shop in Pennsylvania.
1779
Late in the 1700s, makers in Italy and southern France began fitting single strings instead of pairs, and added a sixth. A guitar labelled Gaetano Vinaccia, Naples, 1779 is widely considered the earliest surviving unmodified six-string guitar. Neapolitan makers such as the Fabricatore family soon made many more.
Why it mattered. Six single strings, tuned E A D G B E, is the guitar almost everyone plays today.
1833
C. F. Martin, a guitar maker from Markneukirchen in Saxony, arrived in New York in 1833 and opened a small shop. In 1839 the company moved to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where it still makes guitars today. It is still run by the Martin family.
Why it mattered. Martin went on to shape the American steel-string guitar more than any other maker.
1850
1850s (credited)
Inside the top of a guitar are thin wooden struts called braces. Martin is generally credited with developing X-bracing in the 1850s: two braces crossing in an X below the sound hole. Historians say Martin may not have invented it, but was the first to use it on a large scale.
Why it mattered. X-bracing let a thin top survive the pull of steel strings, and nearly every steel-string guitar uses it today.
1852
1852–1870 (first period)
Antonio de Torres made his guitars bigger, but with thinner, lighter tops held up by a fan of braces. In 1862 he even built one with papier-mâché back and sides, to show that the top, not the back, makes the sound. He used a string length of about 650 mm, which classical makers still follow.
Why it mattered. Most classical guitars today are still built to Torres’s plan.
1889 – 1950
Steel strings, bigger bodies, slides and metal cones make the guitar louder, and the Hawaiian steel guitar travels the world.
1889
1889 (as he told it)
Joseph Kekuku said that as a schoolboy in Honolulu he picked up a bolt and slid it along his guitar strings. He refined the trick with a polished steel bar, playing with the guitar flat on his lap. He took this Hawaiian steel guitar on tours of America and Europe.
Why it mattered. Sliding a bar instead of pressing frets gave the guitar a gliding, singing voice that later travelled to India.
1916
1916, then 1931
Players wanted louder guitars, and by 1921 Martin was mostly making steel-string guitars. In 1916 Martin built a big, deep body for the Ditson company, named after a huge battleship. Martin sold it under its own name from 1931, with X-bracing, and it became its best seller.
Why it mattered. The big-bodied dreadnought became the shape most people picture when they think "acoustic guitar".
1927
1–2 August 1927
At the Bristol sessions in 1927, the Carter Family made their first records. Maybelle Carter, then 18, played the melody on the low strings with her thumb while brushing the high strings for rhythm. Her style became known as the Carter scratch.
Why it mattered. She showed that one guitar could play melody and rhythm at once, and generations of guitarists copied her.
1927
1927–1928
John Dopyera built guitars with thin aluminium cones under the bridge, working like loudspeakers. He and George Beauchamp founded the National String Instrument Corporation in 1927. In 1928 Dopyera and his brothers started Dobro, whose single cone was cheaper and louder.
Why it mattered. Guitarists were desperate to be heard over horns and drums, and this was the loudest answer before electricity.
1941
1941–1947
Tau Moe, a Samoan-born musician raised in Hawaii, first toured India in the late 1920s. He lived in Calcutta from 1941 to 1947, where his family performed, taught Hawaiian guitar and built steel guitars. By the 1960s the steel guitar was common in Indian popular and film music.
Why it mattered. The Hawaiian slide guitar took root in India and grew into a new classical instrument.
1931 – 1960
Pickups turn string vibrations into electricity. Hollow electrics, then solid bodies and the humbucker, make the electric guitar a mass product.
1931
1931 (prototype), 1932 (sold)
George Beauchamp and Paul Barth built a pickup: a coil of wire under the strings, with two horseshoe magnets arching over them. Adolph Rickenbacker’s company made it from cast aluminium from 1932, as a lap steel guitar nicknamed the Frying Pan. The patent came in 1937.
Why it mattered. It is widely considered the first commercially successful electric guitar.
1934
In 1928 a fire badly burned two fingers of Django Reinhardt’s left hand. He taught himself to play again using mostly his index and middle fingers. In 1934 he and violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France.
Why it mattered. It was among the first jazz bands to put the guitar out in front as a lead instrument.
1936
1936, then 1939
In 1936 Gibson launched the ES-150, a hollow Spanish-style guitar with a pickup, sold with an amplifier. Charlie Christian bought one and in 1939 joined Benny Goodman’s band. Now a guitar was loud enough to take solos in a big band.
Why it mattered. It was the first commercially successful Spanish-style electric guitar, and its pickup became known as the Charlie Christian pickup.
1940
c. 1940
Hollow electric guitars howled with feedback when played loud. Les Paul built the Log from a solid 4-by-4-inch length of Douglas fir, with a bridge and a pickup on top. A solid body barely vibrates, so the sound comes from the strings and pickup alone.
Why it mattered. It showed that an electric guitar did not need a hollow body at all.
1945
Sister Rosetta Tharpe sang gospel while playing driving electric guitar, and was a star from the late 1930s. Her 1945 record "Strange Things Happening Every Day" reached No. 2 on the Billboard race records chart and is called by some the first rock and roll record. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard all learned from her.
Why it mattered. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame calls her the first guitar heroine of rock and roll.
1950
1950–1951
Leo Fender made a simple solid guitar with a bolt-on neck, easy to build and fix. It came out in 1950 as the Esquire and Broadcaster, and was renamed the Telecaster in 1951 after a clash over the Broadcaster name. Factories could now make electric guitars like any other product.
Why it mattered. The Telecaster and Esquire were the first mass-produced, commercially successful solid-body electric guitars.
1952
Gibson answered Fender with its own solid-body guitar, named after Les Paul, who helped with the design. It had a carved top and a thick, heavy body. It went on sale in 1952.
Why it mattered. The Les Paul and the Telecaster set the two main styles of solid electric guitar.
1954
Fender’s second solid guitar had a curved, comfortable body, three pickups and a vibrato bar that bends the pitch. Each pickup sits at a different distance from the bridge, so each hears the string’s vibration differently. It went into production in 1954.
Why it mattered. The Stratocaster became one of the most copied guitar shapes in the world.
1955
filed 1955, granted 1959
A single coil picks up hum from mains wiring as well as the strings. Seth Lover put two coils side by side with opposite magnets, wired so the hum cancels but the string signal adds up. Gibson used it from 1957, and the patent (US 2,896,491) was granted in 1959.
Why it mattered. The humbucker gave a quieter, fatter sound, and most electric guitars now use one or a single-coil design.
1958 – today
Distortion becomes the sound of rock, television spreads guitar mania, and Indian musicians turn the slide guitar into a classical instrument.
1958
31 March 1958
Link Wray wanted his record to sound as raw as his live shows, so he poked a pencil through his amplifier’s speaker cone. "Rumble" was full of fuzzy, overdriven power chords, and some radio stations refused to play it. It reached No. 16 on the US pop chart.
Why it mattered. Distortion went from an accident to something guitarists did on purpose.
1962
In 1961 a faulty mixing desk in Nashville turned a guitar part fuzzy on a Marty Robbins record. Two engineers built a circuit to make that sound on purpose, and Gibson sold it in 1962 as the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone. After Keith Richards used one on "Satisfaction" in 1965, sales jumped.
Why it mattered. Clipping the top off the signal adds new harmonics, and that sound became the voice of rock.
1964
9 February 1964
More than 73 million Americans watched the Beatles play on The Ed Sullivan Show. It set a record for US television at the time. The night inspired many young viewers to pick up guitars and form bands.
Why it mattered. Two electric guitars, a bass and drums became the standard rock band.
1967
Brij Bhushan Kabra discovered the Hawaiian slide guitar in Kolkata and promised his father he would play only classical music on it. He added drone and sympathetic strings, and became the first Indian musician to play ragas on the guitar. In 1967 he recorded Call of the Valley with Shivkumar Sharma and Hariprasad Chaurasia.
Why it mattered. Call of the Valley became one of the best-selling Indian music albums worldwide and made the guitar a classical Indian instrument.
1994
recorded 1992, Grammy 1994
Vishwa Mohan Bhatt from Jaipur plays the Mohan veena, a slide guitar he rebuilt with extra drone and sympathetic strings. He and the American guitarist Ry Cooder met half an hour before recording A Meeting by the River in one evening. The album won the Grammy for Best World Music Album at the 1994 awards.
Why it mattered. A guitar reshaped in India won one of music’s biggest prizes.
By the numbers
The last serial number Martin gave out each year. Numbering began in 1898 at 8,000, Martin’s estimate of the guitars it had made since 1833.
Did you know?
The six strings of a light acoustic set pull on the neck with about 160 pounds (73 kg) of force in total, roughly the weight of a grown man.
Antonio de Torres built a guitar with a papier-mâché back and sides in 1862, to prove that the top makes the sound.
Joseph Kekuku said the Hawaiian steel guitar began when he picked up a bolt on a road in Honolulu and slid it along his strings.
The Broadcaster was renamed the Telecaster because Gretsch already sold "Broadkaster" drums. Guitars made in between, with the name cut off the decal, are called Nocasters.
Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Ry Cooder met only half an hour before recording their Grammy-winning album, and made it in one evening.
The people
789 – 857 · Musician and teacher · Baghdad, then Córdoba
Said to have added a fifth string to the oud, and founded a music school in al-Andalus.
1817 – 1892 · Guitar maker · Spain
Built bigger guitars with thin, fan-braced tops: the plan of the modern classical guitar.
1796 – 1873 · Guitar maker · Saxony (Germany), then USA
Founded C. F. Martin & Co., the company credited with X-bracing.
c. 1874 – 1932 · Steel guitarist · Hawaii
Credited with inventing Hawaiian steel guitar playing with a sliding steel bar.
1909 – 1978 · Guitarist and singer · USA
Her Carter scratch let one guitar carry melody and rhythm together.
1899 – 1941 · Inventor and musician · USA
Co-founded National and designed the Frying Pan, the first commercially successful electric guitar.
1910 – 1953 · Jazz guitarist · Belgium, then France
Played lead jazz guitar with mostly two fingers of his burned left hand.
1915 – 1973 · Singer and guitarist · USA
Gospel star on electric guitar, called the godmother of rock and roll.
1915 – 2009 · Guitarist and inventor · USA
Built the solid-body Log and pioneered multitrack recording.
1909 – 1991 · Inventor and manufacturer · USA
Made the Telecaster and Stratocaster, easy to build and easy to fix.
1910 – 1997 · Electronics engineer · USA
Invented Gibson’s humbucker, which cancels electrical hum.
1937 – 2018 · Slide guitarist · India
Adapted the Hawaiian guitar for ragas and is called the father of Hindustani slide guitar.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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