The Panama Canal was inaugurated in August of 1914. On February 20, 1915 the huge Panama-Pacific International Exposition opened in San Francisco celebrating this event. The Hawaiian pavilion had a great many native musicians, and afforded the public the chance to discover the music of the islands.

The new sound spread swiftly around the world. It immediately influenced musicians and west coast luthiers, notably Christopher Knutsen and Hermann Weissenborn.

In 1916, the Victor Record Company (later RCA Victor) sold more Hawaiian records than that of any other genre. And virtually every guitar sold during this period had accessories to modify it for Hawaiian lap-style playing.

"Steel guitar" usually connotes lap-style playing. "Slide" is usually associated with guitars held in standard face-forward position and usually with blues players and their ilk, who can also use fingers to fret notes in a conventional manner.

Bob Brozman: "In the beginning (before European contact), there was no guitar in Hawaiian music. There was just percussion and a 2 note scale with which they sang stories as part of their everyday life. The Americans appropriated the country but the Hawaiians refused to work for them. So, Hawaiians had contact with South Americans who introduced the guitar to the islands."

Brozman adds "They adopted the open G tuning. It's a tuning universal to many people who were colonized, and is found along the the Mississippi river, in Mexico, Cuba, Africa and even in India."

Paul Hostetter adds "[Actually] the Spanish scordatura tunings (what we call open tuning like G and D) were popular in Spain and traveled around the world in the 19th century but not necessarily because of colonization. They were also spread because of traveling entertainers, particularly in the late in the 19th and into the early 20th centuries."

Hawaiian guitar uses a hard object, like the back of a comb, pocket knife, or best, a steel bar, to touch and shorten the strings to change their pitch, rather than using the fingers to press the strings against a fret. All manner of slides, graces, glissandi and vocal effects are available when using a steel, and it was this sound that influenced blues players to use slides or bottlenecks to get that "whining" tone characterizing old Delta blues.


The inventor(s) of the Hawaiian steel guitar

Among the contenders for the crown of the inventor of the Hawaiian steel guitar are Joseph Kekuku, Gabriel Davion and James Hoa.

According to the legend, around 1885 a 11-years-old student of the guitar named Joseph Kekuku picked up a railroad spike and had by chance slid it along the strings of his guitar.

A second version says; one evening in 1885, in dormitory C of the Kakehameha School for Boys in Honolulu, he accidentally dropped his comb on the strings of his spanish guitar, the subsequent sliding sound that the comb produced caught his attention. Kekuku would frequently accompany his cousin, who played violin. He was captivated with the smooth slides that his cousin could produce on the instrument. And the comb sliding across the strings made a sound like a violin.

For the next 7 years he taught himself to master producing the unique and sweet sounds. In the school shop, Kekuku definitely worked to develop the technique: modifying his guitar by raising the nut, designing individual metal fingerpicks for the opposing hand, and producing a steel cylinder specifically for playing slide. He also switched from gut to wire strings for more sustained notes.

Until his death in Boston in 1932, Kekuku toured the United States and most of Europe teaching and popularizing the Hawaiian steel guitar.

Knutsen was born in Norway on June 24, 1862. He emigrated to the USA (Minnesota) at age 3 with his parents in 1865 and died in Los Angeles at age 68, on November 6, 1930.

Knutsen lived and worked in a number of places: Port Townsend, Tacoma, Seattle and Los Angeles.
About 1890-1900, he started by building harp guitars. In the first decade of the century, he began to build a number of different Hawaiian steel guitars of various shapes and sizes, many of which were copied by other luthiers and manufacturers. Unfortunately he didn't receive much credit or remuneration for his pioneering ideas.
His koa/mahogany guitars were very light, with a body under the length of the neck to increase resonance and volume, which was helpful in developing low tones.

More info and photos on Gregg Miner's website :
http://home.earthlink.net/~chrisknutsen

Hermann Weissenborn was born in 1865 and, by 1911 was established as a maker of musical instruments, working early on out of 215 S. Olive Street in downtown Los Angeles. Although he moved several times, he remained in that city until he passed away in January 1937. His timing as a luthier could not have been better, since the Panama Pacific Exposition, which was held in San Francisco in 1915, brought about a huge demand for Hawaiian music and the instruments needed to play it. By 1916 Hermann was making his first hollow neck Hawaiian guitars out of koa, the beautiful golden colored wood indigenous to that territory. Although he also made parlor style guitars and ukuleles, his Hawaiian steel guitars have become legendary and have made his name immortal.