A natural musician, he was as fascinated by the flow of electricity as by the flow of music. He would prove to be an American innovator who had an artistic feel for electric current that was as ingrained as Twain's artistic feel for the Mississippi's current.
In the early 30s, the up-and-coming professional guitarist began burning his energies on this central vision: a guitar that would produce undistorted electronic sounds.
"What I wanted to do," Mr. Paul told me, "is not have two things vibrating. I wanted the string to vibrate and nothing else. I wanted the guitar to sustain longer than an acoustical box and have different sounds than an acoustical box."
The concept, of course, fired a cannon shot across the bow of the aesthetic canon that guitars resonate. But it was Mr. Paul's precocious perception to see that the presence of electric current changed the entire context of the source. The requirements were different. The acoustic guitar used its hollowness to get vibrations.
With electricity, the vibrations hurt more than helped. The sound would be purer if the body was non-vibrating, stable, solid. The guitar was not to be the sound producer, after all, but the conveyer.
With the vitality of the pioneer and the certitude of the visionary, Mr. Paul hunkered down for years fashioning a guitar geared for a galvanic generation. He handled electricity as if it were a new vernacular and, like Dante writing in his native Italian, dared to create in the language of his day.
He determinedly sliced through one problem after another, the first problem being how the instrument would pick up the electric impulse so the strings would make a sound.
Explains Mr. Paul: "I picked it up first with the other half of a telephone—a magnet and a coil—put it under the strings. Then I used the phonograph—jabbed the needle in the top of the guitar."
Observing that the hollowness of the instrument was interfering with the electronic sound, he realized that a solid surface would serve better.
"I knew that what I needed was a guitar with no holes," says Mr. Paul. "I chucked rags in it. I poured it full of plaster of Paris. I tried everything with the guitar to try to get it to not feed back and not sound like an acoustical box."
He finally hit on his breakthrough in 1941. While F.D.R. was warming up the country with his fireside chats, 26-year-old Les Paul was leaving his fireside for a factory every Sunday.
Epiphone guitars, above a Woolworth's on 14th Street in New York City, was letting him use their factory once a week to work on his guitar-designing.
He spent most of every Sunday in the factory while Big Band's big names serenaded New York hotels: Eddy Duchin at the Waldorf, Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt, Benny Goodman at the New Yorker.
On his Sundays at the factory, he took a four-inch-by-four-inch piece of wood and attached the sides of a cut-up guitar onto it. There it was: a solid, non-vibrating guitar. The inventor-guitarist had redesigned some old tools—wood and string—into a new instrument. He dubbed it "The Log."
More than three-score years later, the solidbody electric guitar has become the biggest All-American wooden symbol since the baseball bat or the log cabin. And like the log cabin, the instrument embodies a pioneering spirit that is enduring.
Over the years he has pointed to the formation of that piece in 1941 as the most essential step in the development of the solidbody prototype.
With the hope that his solid guitar would be his solid gangplank to other worlds, the guitar journeyman tried to sell the idea for manufacturing. But when he brought "The Log" to guitar companies, they eyed him like Cagney eyeing the FBI.
