Although our journey here involves an exploration of electromagnetic*pickups used on electric guitars, it’s worth visiting a few other significant designs along the way, even those that are all but forgotten, and perhaps even went tragically unsung in their day. One such detour should pay brief homage to the father of the humbucking pickup … and right here where you’re anticipating the name ‘Seth Lover’, I’m going to delight in throwing out instead the unfamiliar moniker Armand F. Knoblaugh, a designer working for the Baldwin Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. A good 21 years before Gibson was awarded a patent for Seth Lover's humbucking pickup, Baldwin was awarded a patent for a humbucking pickup design filed on the company's behalf by Knoblaugh in 1935. Sure, the unit was intended primarily to amplify the electric piano, but Knoblaugh’s application also states that it can be used on other instruments that employ vibrating steel strings, so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to adapt it to the guitar. Here’s the kicker though — the application states,“The principal object of my invention is the elimination of effects caused by stray magnetic fields and such elimination of the device of my invention, without affecting its sensitivity to the motion of the adjacent magnetized strings. For example, let the coils [figs 11 and 12] be identically constructed and be connected in series in an opposite sense… The induction of electromotive forces by stray magnetic fields into coil 12 is then counterbalanced, part by part, by the induction of equal and opposite electromotive forces into coil 11, with the result that any reproduced extraneous noises, such as hum, are essentially eliminated.” (A.F. Knoblaugh, Patent Number 2,119,584).”
Alsjeblieft.