I always thought of Leo Fender as the true innovator of the electric guitar. AFAIR, Les Paul was even opposed to the idea of solid body guitars, and only did the classic Les Paul after seeing Leo Fender's huge success with Telecaster et. al.

The funniest thing is that the duped article is also already a dupe. The original original article of the dupe dupe would be: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/14/223241