Rowe Industries
One of his early contracts was as a design consultant for small manufacturing firms owned by entrepreneur Horace Rowe, a relationship that lasted through 1975.
Among other commercial directions, Fox manufactured small electric motors, which required the tooling to create coils of insulated copper wire.
The RH was designed to fit into the opening of a standard ("round hole") guitar, with a wire clip at one end and two adjustable spring-steel arms at the other, making the device readily removable.
Later, an option was offered with a shorter pressure rod intended to be attached to the side of the guitar's neck with two small screws; this provided less interference with the guitarist's right hand as well as an aesthetically "cleaner" appearance.
The pressure-rod pickup design originally used an output cable with a threaded female connector on one end and a 1/4" plug on the other, a common configuration for high-impedance microphones of the era.
In the 1950s, with the increasing popular interest in "electrified" guitars, some manufacturers turned to Rowe Industries rather than expending resources on making their own pickups.
Being very simple in design, most of these pickups had no height adjustment, and often needed to be installed on some sort of a riser or pedestal to achieve optimum distance from the strings.
Though widely scorned for years, these "cool"-impedance pickups eventually achieved popularity, in part because of the unique tone imparted by the heavy steel mounting plates.
These feature a moderately complex system of individual polepiece height adjustment, with the result that the steel components account for part of the pickup's unique tonal characteristics.
Other brands include Airline, D'Angelico, Eko, Epiphone, Fender, Galanti, Guild, Hofner, Kustom, Levin, Meazzi, Messenger, Micro-Frets, Premier, Silvertone, and Standel.
Seeing a rising market for relatively simple (yet profitable) effects devices, in the later 1960s Rowe increased output of new effects-box models, the Square Wave Distortion Generator and the DeArmond Wa-Wa pedal.
Harry DeArmond retired in 1976, by which time his company had designed and manufactured over 170 different pickups for a wide range of stringed instruments, and many amplifiers and effects units.
[citation needed]A DeArmond pickup was used by guitarist Vic Flick on a 1939 English Clifford Essex Paragon De Luxe guitar recording the original James Bond Theme at CTS studios in Bayswater, London.[when?]
