Martin Guitar | 8 months ago
Before the D-18 and D-28 rode onto the music scene in 1931, there was the Ditson 111, the world’s first Dreadnought guitar. The design was born out of Martin’s partnership with the Ditson Company, a major instrument dealer and music publisher in the early 20th century. The 111 was inspired by an extra-large guitar that Ditson built for the Hawaiian virtuoso musician Mekia Kealakai in early 1916. Kealakai’s guitar looked more like an enlarged 000 with a narrow waist. Martin had already been building a line of wide-waisted guitars and ukuleles for Ditson, and the company stuck with that aesthetic when building the Dreadnought. The Ditson 111 had an awe-inspiring size that made Martin’s leader at the time, Frank Henry Martin, think of the H.M.S. Dreadnought class of British warships that had dominated the seas since their inception a decade earlier. The name Dreadnought was borrowed for the guitar that would go on to be the most copied and widely recognized acoustic guitar design in the world.
