I don't know who said it to whom, but I'm guessing they were talking about the Gibson Les Paul.Who said to whom?
"Nobody wants that. It's solid"
FYIThe earliest known commercially produced Spanish solid-body electric was the 1939 Slingerland, model No. 141.... Around 1940, Les Paul experimented with such a design, and in 1947, Paul Bigsby teamed up with country singer Merle Travis to design a solid-body guitar that more closely resembled the ones we know today. But it was radio repairman Leo Fender who would be the first to successfully mass-produce and market a Spanish-style solid-body electric guitar. Slingerland never really promoted their electric guitar or their electric lap steel, and did not have the distribution network that other manufacturers had and they ceased production of them at the start of World War II.
Les Pauls prototype 'The Log' was a post or piece of railway which had the strings and pickups but the sides were from an acoustic guitar, so essentially this was a semi-acoustic not completely solid.Chas,
Les Paul had a prototype solid-body about 5 years before Fender and Rickenbacker went into production, but Gibson didn't want to build it at the time. When Fender and Rickenbacker put solid bodied guitars into production, Gibson approached Les Paul and put the Gibson Les Paul into production.
So, Dennis's answer sounds reasonable, but I haven't been able to find any sources that corroborate it.
David
The story goes that Les took the original log (sans wings, just the 4x4 with neck and pickups) to a club, where it was poorly received. So he sawed off the bouts from the donor guitar from which he had taken the neck, and glued them onto the log. In an interview he said: "As soon as I put wings on it, and fastened two sides on it so that it looked like a guitar, then they applauded. So I realized that many people hear with their eyes."Les Pauls prototype 'The Log' was a post or piece of railway which had the strings and pickups but the sides were from an acoustic guitar, so essentially this was a semi-acoustic not completely solid.