Les Paul

What failed

His first attempt at a solid-body guitar was his own acoustic packed with plaster of Paris, which reduced the feedback without curing it and made the guitar heavier. His next was a string stretched over a length of railroad rail, which worked and could not be taken on stage. When he finally built the thing — a four-by-four block of pine — audiences would not accept the look of it, so he sawed an archtop in half and bolted the halves on as wings. He took it to the president of Gibson's parent company in 1941 and they laughed at him. Then he was badly burned by an electric shock in his own workshop, and in 1948 a car crash shattered his right arm so completely that the doctors wanted to amputate.

What happened next

He talked them out of amputating and had the arm fused at just over ninety degrees, the one angle that would still let him hold and pick a guitar. It took about eighteen months to recover. In 1950, after Fender got there first, Gibson came looking for the man with the broomstick. The Les Paul went on sale in 1952.

The point

The story is usually told as ten years of Gibson saying no. There is one documented refusal, in 1941, and then nine years of nobody being interested — which is a different and more ordinary kind of failure. Gibson's own president later said the delay was partly that Les Paul was loyal to a rival brand. Both men were telling the truth as they had it.