RIP Eddie Van Halen, Accomplished Technologist

The late rock god was also an unsung tech genius

Brian Merchant
Debugger
Published in
2 min readOct 8, 2020

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Edward L. Van Halen, musical instrument support, US4656917A/Google Patents

Every rock song is the sound of advancing technology.

The electric guitar was maybe the first popular instrument that was an ongoing engineering project, a device whose sound was constantly refined, distorted, and modernized to the mold of the cultural moment by musicians…

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Brian Merchant
Debugger

Senior editor, OneZero, books, futures, fiction. Author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, founder of Terraform @ Motherboard @ VICE.