Milestone Guitars
The history of the guitar would seem to span at least 4,000 years, back to ancient Babylon.
There have been many developments along the way and the family tree has had several interesting branches and offshoots. I'll start my account of modern guitar history with Johann Stauffer, an Austrian luthier in the early 19th century. Stauffer built some fine instruments that would seem fairly familiar to us today. In the 19th century the word guitar probably meant an instrument that had a flat top with a round or ovular sound-hole. Many of those guitars were small by today's standards but their shape and layout were similar to the flattop guitars we have today.
Working as an apprentice to Stauffer was one Christian Frederick Martin. In time he took his skills back to his native Germany and subsequently to his new home in the United States. Eventually settling in Nazareth, PA, Martin guitars led the field and introduced X-bracing, an innovation that is with us to this day.
In the late 19th century a popular group of entertainers traveled the
US playing mandolins. Soon a mandolin craze developed and from
roughly 1880 until the 1920s mandolins were very popular. In
pursuit of a better sounding mandolin a hobbyist named Orville Gibson
came up with the idea of carved, solid-wood tops and backs that somewhat
resembled the tops and backs of violins. His idea worked and he
patented it. He worked on his own for a few years and then ended
up selling the rights to his design to a group of investors that became
the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar manufacturing company. In the meantime,
Gibson himself had applied his carved top idea to guitars.
