Les Paul, the only person to be inducted to both Rock and Roll and Inventor's Hall of Fames

Les Paul, the great jazz/pop guitarist and inventor of the modern solid body electric guitar passed away on August 13th. Paul was 94 years old.

Paul's musical performance career began in the 1930's playing jazz and country music on the radio and touring with a popular dance orchestra. During that period, he began to tinker with guitars and amplification. At the time, electric guitars were a relatively recent innovation, and the guitars available on the market were "hollowbodies," structurally similar to acoustic guitars. Paul found that the tone was weak and the guitars were prone to feedback.

“I was interested in proving that a vibration-free top was the way to go. I even built a guitar out of a railroad rail to prove it. What I wanted was to amplify pure string vibration, without the resonance of the wood getting involved in the sound." Les Paul, quoted in a nice profile on Gibson's website.

That railroad rail evolved into the first solid body electric guitar, Patent No. 3,018,680.

Paul continued tinkering with sound recording and technique over the next 7 (!) decades, always pushing the envelope in terms of both his equipment and his playing style. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2005.