First of all, let me apologize if I'm coming across as hostile. I'm not really hostile, at least not towards any of you guys. You're my people. I might be excitable...
I empathize with ya totally.
OK, imagine it's something like 1950 (feel free to correct the dates; I'm just going for a general sequence of events.) Magnetic pickups on archtop guitars is old news. It's so old that you realize that the giant acoustic box might not even be necessary. Actually, even that's old news as solid lap steel guitars have been around for a while and that crazy left-coast company Fender is selling quite a few non-acoustic electric guitars. You've got a tight relationship with Gibson - you've sold a lot of records made with their instruments and they want to make you happy, so you approach them with the idea of a solid electric guitar. Now this is Gibson we're talking about. They're not going to bolt a neck to a piece of 2x12 lumber like that other company.
OK at this point, since I don't know how familiar you are with Les Paul's accomplishments I'm gonna take a guess that's a tongue-in-cheek observation on a par with some of the ones I come up with.
But just in case it wasn't, from the "
usual source":
"The Gibson Les Paul, one of the world's most popular electric guitars, was inspired by Paul's "Log".
Paul's innovative guitar, "The Log", built after-hours in the Epiphone guitar factory in 1940,
a 4" × 4" chunk of pine with strings and a pickup, was one of the first solid-body electric guitars..In 1941 he created a prototype instrument, known as the Log, which he fashioned from a four-foot wooden board...Although Paul approached the Gibson Guitar Corporation with his idea of a solid body electric guitar in 1941, it showed no interest until Fender began marketing its Esquire; this later had a second pickup added and became known as the Broadcaster. (The Broadcaster was renamed the Telecaster in 1952.)"
All of which tends to affirm the previous observation that the Les Paul was actually largely designed by McCarty and Co and that Gibson probably
simply wanted to associate the guitar with a hot recording act of the era:
"Additionally, Gibson's president Ted McCarty stated that the Gibson Guitar Corporation approached Les Paul for the right to imprint the musician's name on the headstock with the intention of increasing sales".
In any case, as pointed out, when something becomes such an icon it becomes a kind of universally accepted reference point for comparison, whether or not the comparison is appropriate or not, as couple of guys have mentioned.
And you also bring up that well-known paradigm of industrial design: that form follows function (as it should), so things that are designed with a given task in mind often wind up having very similar forms.
In fact violating that principle is the primary source of one of my pet peeves: Dysfunctional Designs.