Les Paul’s work in revolutionizing the electric guitar and forever changing music recording is well known, but his inventions didn’t stop there.
For example, when a car crash left the engineer staring down the barrel of a possible arm amputation, he conceived a guitar that would have allowed him to play on should the worst happen.
On January 2, 1948, Les Paul and Mary Ford were driving through a snowstorm on Route 66, somewhere in Oklahoma. They hit a patch of ice and skidded off a bridge, landing in a ravine some 20 feet below them.
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The damage was devastating, with Paul breaking multiple ribs and his nose, cracking vertebrae, fracturing his pelvis, puncturing his spleen and, most heartbreakingly of all, shattering his right arm.
Paul was resolute. He asked for his arm to be set in such a position that would allow him to play the guitar while he recovered from a crash that very nearly killed him.
Doctors, meanwhile, feared his arm wouldn’t recover. Amputation was a stark possibility. So the man that changed the course of music and guitar history started thinking of a backup plan.
“I thought, if they’re going to amputate my arm, I’ll play the guitar with one hand,” Paul told Guitar World in March 1983. “To do that, I conceived the synthesized guitar, which you play with your left hand. You key the notes so it sounds like you’re playing with both hands.”
Thankfully, Les Paul’s right arm – and just about every other damaged body part – recovered. Had it not, who knows what might have happened to his flagship. The Log had been design just a year earlier. The Les Paul would eventually arrive in 1952. His focus may have been elsewhere.
Still, he never forgot his synth guitar idea, which would have been his saving grace had an amputation been necessary. But there was another overarching reason he never went further down the rabbit hole with it.
“Years later, I was at a National Association of Music Merchandisers show with the Gibson people, and they said, ‘Les, we want to show you something we want to invest in,’” he recalled.
“They were talking to me about this fellow from Belgium with a guitar that sounded like an organ. I said, ‘You want me to tell you just how he does it? I know all about it; I can tell you exactly what he does!’
“They were shocked that before we knocked on his door I’d already told them how this man was doing it, and how expensive it would be,” he added. “Terribly expensive, and probably not worth getting involved with. I know they never followed through.’”
Tragically, Les Paul’s former home and workshop was destroyed by private developers last month. That building had birthed some of Les Paul’s and music’s most vital inventions.
While much of the original equipment had long been relocated to the Les Paul Recording Studio (opened in March 2025), Paul’s son has been left “heartbroken” by the building’s demolition.
