Clarence Leonidas “Leo” Fender was an American inventor who founded the Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company, or Fender for short. In January 1965, he sold the company to CBS and later founded two other musical instrument companies, Music Man and G&L Musical Instruments.
From an early age, Fender showed an interest in tinkering with electronics. When he was 13 years old, his uncle, who ran an automotive electric shop, sent him a box filled with discarded car radio parts and a battery.
The following year, Leo visited his uncle’s shop in Santa Maria, California, and was fascinated by a radio his uncle had built from spare parts and placed on display in the shop window.
Leo later claimed that the loud music coming from the speaker of that radio made a lasting impression on him. Soon after, Leo began repairing radios in a small shop in his parents’ home.
In the spring of 1928, Fender graduated from Fullerton Union High School and entered Fullerton Junior College that fall, as an accounting major. While he was studying to be an accountant, he continued to teach himself electronics, and tinker with radios and other electrical items, but never took any type of electronics course.
After college, Fender took a job as a delivery man for Consolidated Ice and Cold Storage Company in Anaheim, where he was later made the bookkeeper. It was around this time that a local band leader approached Leo, asking him if he could build a public address system for use by the band at dances in Hollywood. Fender was contracted to build six of these PA systems.
In 1933, Fender met Esther Klosky, and they were married in 1934. About that time, he took a job as an accountant for the California Highway Department in San Luis Obispo. Due to the Great Depression, he was dismissed from his government job, and he then took a position in the accounting department of a tire company. After working there for six months, Leo lost his job along with the other accountants at the firm.
In 1938, with a borrowed $600, Leo and Esther returned to Fullerton, and Leo 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, Leo 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.
In 1944, Leo and Doc 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 Fender.
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. 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. Les Paul’s one-off home-made “Log” and the Bigsby Travis guitar made for Merle Travis are probably 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 1949, he finished the prototype of a thin solid-body electric; it was first released in 1950 as the Fender Esquire (with a solid body and one pickup), and renamed first Broadcaster and then Telecaster (with two pickups) the year after.
The Telecaster, initially equipped with two single-coil pickups and widely used among country and western players, 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.
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