The Unbreakable Inventor Who Changed Rock and Roll, a Musical Mystery

by Drew Holmes

Lester bolted upright in the passenger seat as he woke with a start. Hearing the driver of your car scream in panic will do that to you.

It was January and he and his girlfriend Mary were traveling down Route 66 near Davenport, Oklahoma. Lester was running a fever and in no shape to drive, so the task fell to Mary. They unexpectedly ran into a winter storm when she lost control of the car on the slick street.

Lester, now wide awake, sprang into action. He kicked Mary’s foot off the brake, grabbed the wheel, and attempted to straighten out the car. The last thing he remembered was saying “This is it” before throwing his right arm around her to protect her face.

The local papers would report that the car skidded off the overpass and plunged 20 feet into the ravine below, sending Lester, Mary, and their musical equipment through the convertible’s roof as it landed upside down.

Two things worked in their favor that night. First, because the car was not equipped with them, they were not wearing seatbelts. Lester believed this saved their lives since they were not strapped in place when the car landed. And second, the accident took out the nearby phone lines, causing the phone company to send out a repair crew despite the storm. Though help did not arrive on the scene for eight hours, it came much faster than if the phone lines had remained intact.

Mary emerged from the accident relatively unscathed. Lester was not so lucky. He suffered six broken ribs, a fractured pelvis, broken vertebrae, a punctured spleen, a broken nose, and, most unfortunately, a shattered right arm and crushed elbow. The fever he had been nursing turned out to be pneumonia which combined with his injuries nearly killed him.

Most doctors would be forgiven for recommending amputating the mangled limb. Lester’s doctor, however, was stubborn. He knew his patient was a guitar player and was determined to save his arm. Several surgeries over the next few weeks healed Lester enough to fly back to California to see a bone specialist.

The specialist wanted to replace Lester’s elbow with a piece of bone from his leg, but there would no longer be a joint. Once the bone was set, his arm would be forever in that position. That gave Lester a radical idea — set the bone at a nearly 90-degree angle, the exact position required to play his guitar.

The surgery was successful, and Lester spent the next year and half recovering. Faced with the possibility of never playing guitar again, he started to think of other ways to make music. He drew up plans for a guitar synthesizer that he could play with only one hand. He refined some ideas for utilizing tape recorders developed by the Germans during World War II, which would eventually lead to breakthroughs in multi-track recording and overdubbing.

Not only did Lester resume his impressive guitar playing career, but he also continued tinkering and inventing new gear that pushed music in entirely new directions. When he died in 2009, many of the top musicians of the day weighed in on his importance. Richie Sambora called him “a revolutionary in the music business”. Slash said he was “vibrant and full of positive energy” and the Edge commented “His legacy as a musician and inventor will live on and his influence on rock and roll will never be forgotten.”

His accolades are numerous, including inductions into the Big Band & Jazz Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is the only person enshrined in both the Inventors Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he was inducted in 1988 alongside Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles.

Despite all his other inventions, he is best remembered for one that he had been working on prior to his accident. He had initially presented this invention to the Gibson Guitar Corporation in 1941 and they passed, but later revisited it when rival manufacturer Fender released their own version. Over the years he would continue to refine his invention and in 1962 received US patent 3018680A for what was officially described as an “Electrical Musical Instrument”. Today that invention is known as the solid body electric guitar, an iconic instrument which is played every day in nearly every music venue around the world. A guitar bearing the name of its inventor, Lester William Polsfuss. A rock and roll legend better known as Les Paul.