George Beauchamp in the context of "Pick up (music technology)"

A pickup is an electronic device that converts energy from one form to another that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, and converts these to an electrical signal that is amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a loudspeaker in a speaker enclosure. The signal from a pickup can also be recorded directly.

The first electrical string instrument with pickups, the "Frying Pan" slide guitar, was created by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker around 1931.

The Rickenbacker Electro A-22, nicknamed the "Frying Pan", is the first electric lap steel guitar, also widely considered the first commercially successful electric guitar. Developed in 1931/1932, it received its patent in August 1937.A previous attempt, the Stromberg company‘s transducer-based "Stromberg Electro", was introduced in 1928. It used a "vibration-transfer rod" from the instrument's sounding board attached to magnets inside the guitar, and was not successful. George Beauchamp created the "Fry-Pan" in 1931, and it was subsequently manufactured by Electro String Instrument Corporation under the name Electro, later named Rickenbacker. The instrument gained its nickname because its circular body and long neck make it resemble a frying pan.

It was designed to capitalize on the popularity of Hawaiian music in the 1930s. The instrument was made of cast aluminum, and featured a pickup that incorporated a pair of horseshoe magnets that arched over the strings designed by Paul Barth with George Beauchamp. Beauchamp and machinist Adolph Rickenbacker began selling the guitar in 1932, but Beauchamp was not awarded a patent for his idea until 1937, which allowed other guitar companies to produce electric guitars in the same period.

Adolph Rickenbacker (born Adolf Rickenbacher, April 1, 1887 – March 21, 1976) was an American production engineer and machinist who, together with George Beauchamp, created the first electric string instrument, and co-founded the Rickenbacker guitar company, also with Beauchamp.

Rickenbacker was born in Basel, Switzerland as Adolf Rickenbacher. As a child in 1891, he immigrated to the United States with older relatives after his parents died, settling in Columbus Ohio and later southern California. He Anglicized both his own name, and that of his company's brand, to Rickenbacker to capitalize on the popularity of his second cousin, America's top scoring flying ace of the First World War, Eddie Rickenbacker, who due to the wave of anti-German sentiment caused by the war, had felt pressure to change the spelling of his surname in an effort to "take the Hun out of his name." Eddie was already well known as a racing driver at the time, and his change received wide publicity. "From then on", as he wrote in his autobiography, "most Rickenbachers were practically forced to spell their name in the way I had..."