Leo Fender

Clarence Leonidas Fender (August 10, 1909 – March 21, 1991) was an American inventor and founder of the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.

Fender designed the company's iconic early instruments: the Fender Telecaster, the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar; the Fender Stratocaster, among the most iconic electric guitars; and the Fender Precision Bass, which set the standard for electric basses. He also designed the Fender Bassman amplifier, which became the archetype for later amplifiers (notably by Marshall and Mesa Boogie) that dominated rock and roll music.

Fender, who was not a guitarist himself, was inducted posthumously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.

Clarence Leonidas Fender was born on August 10, 1909, to Clarence Monte Fender and Harriet Elvira Wood, owners of a successful orange grove located between Anaheim and Fullerton, California. At the age of eight, Fender developed a tumor in his left eye, resulting in the eye being removed and being replaced with a glass eye, making him ineligible for the draft in World War II later in life.

As a youth, Fender played piano and saxophone before his interests shifted toward electronics. When he was 14, Fender visited his uncle's automotive-electric shop in Santa Maria, and was fascinated by a radio his uncle had built from spare parts. Soon thereafter, Fender began repairing radios in a small shop in his parents' home.

In 1928, Fender graduated from Fullerton Union High School, and entered Fullerton Junior College as an accounting major, though he continued to work with electronics. After college, Fender worked as an ice delivery man and later bookkeeper. Around this time, he was approached by a local bandleader asking him to build six public address systems for use in Hollywood dance halls.

In 1938, with a borrowed $600 (equivalent to $13,403 in 2024), Fender and his wife Esther returned to Fullerton, and 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, Fender 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, Fender and Kauffman 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 K&F. In 1946, Doc pulled out of K&F and Fender revised the company and renamed it "Fender Manufacturing", and then later "Fender Electric Instrument Co." at the end of 1947 and he handed over the reins of his radio shop to Dale Hyatt.