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Gibson Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz and a young guitar hero-in-training at the Firebird X launch (© Joe Bosso)

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There aren't too many industries in which designs over half a century old are still considered to represent a high watermark. Yet for all the innovation that has expanded the potential of the electric guitar and made players' lives easier in the decades since, it's still those 1950s and early '60s icons that get pulses racing.

The Telecaster (born in 1950), the Les Paul (1952), the Stratocaster (1954) and the ES-335 (1958), along with a handful of other models from stables like Gretsch and Rickenbacker, still provide the platforms for the overwhelming majority of electric guitars in production across the globe. Aside from aesthetics, the sonic fingerprints of those instruments – found all over early rock 'n' roll and the British beat and blues booms of the '60s – are subject to a similar level of reverence and mass-emulation.

Post Van Halen, a certain type of hard rock and heavy metal guitarist would set off on a different trajectory thanks to the hot-rodded 'Superstrats' popular since the 1980s. However, even those guitars are still based fundamentally on the bolt-on neck architecture conceived by Leo Fender in the late 1940s; albeit updated with outrageous graphic finishes, high output humbucking pickups and double-locking vibrato bridges.

Hundreds of apparently revolutionary alternatives have been marketed in the last few decades, but none have managed to endure like those first iconic electrics, themselves so futuristic in the early 1950s.

Some of the biggest names in rock might have embraced innovation along the way, but time and time again, mainstream acceptance has been in short supply. Despite a high profile 1980s advertising campaign featuring a somewhat dishevelled Jimmy Page playing a Roland G-707 guitar synth controller, then, as now, it's Page's Zeppelin guitars – the '59 Les Pauls, the EDS-1275 doubleneck – that hold the allure.

Happily, none of the above has stopped guitar manufacturers trying to invent something new. The history of the electric guitar is littered with examples of products that were unsuccessful initially but went on achieve iconic status.

The sci-fi lines of Gibson's Explorer and Flying V were virtually laughed out of music stores in the late 1950s, while even the PAF-equipped Les Paul Standard failed to find its niche until six years after it had been discontinued. Then a certain Mr Clapton plugged it into a Marshall in 1966 and reinvented the sound of electric blues...

Similarly, although it was popular with bassists, Fender couldn't have predicted that its late 1950s Tweed Bassman would become arguably the most important electric guitar amplifier of all time, or that its Jazzmaster and Jaguar guitars would find such favour decades later with leftfield indie noiseniks and grunge rockers.

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