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| Leo fender |
Leo met Clayton Orr "Doc" Kauffman an inventor and lap steel player, who had worked for Rickenbacker Guitars. Rickenbacker Guitars company had been building and selling lap steel guitars for a decade. Leo and Doc started the "K & F Manufacturing Corporation". They design and build amplified Hawaiian guitars and amplifiers. In 1944, Leo and Doc patented a lap steel guitar, that had an electric pickup already patented by Fender. In 1945, they began selling the guitar, in a kit with an amplifier designed by Leo.
By 1949, he had begun working in earnest on what became the first Telecaster (originally called the Broadcaster) at the Fender factory in Fullerton, California.
Among his many monumental accomplishments, he designed the first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar, the Telecaster; and introduced the most influential of all electric guitars - the Stratocaster. His amplifiers set the gold standard for tone and reliability against which virtually all amps are still judged well more than half a century later.