Une nouvelle venue

(...) Luthiers in Sicily were always open to both the Baroque influence from Spain and to the innovations coming from Europe and The States. The first great star among Sicilian luthiers was surely Carmelo Catania who was the only one to understand that the image of the luthier had to become more of a businessman to survive on the internal and international market. Carmelo Catania’s golden age was from the end of the war to the 60s. The cultural and economic situation brought Carmelo Catania to produce an incredible wide range of crafted instruments on industrial scale. The few pages of his catalogue here reported show his skills in bringing together all the different external influences in a typically Sicilian sensitivity. Carmelo Catania was probably the first luthier to organize himself industrially, promoting himself, exporting guitars, settling commercial alleys and trades. He created a real production headquarter in Sicily making instruments or parts on behalf of third parties.
http://guitarz.blogspot.ca/201(...).html

Piezo
Pickups for steel string electric guitars did not work on nylon-stringed classical and folk guitars because these guitars do not disturb the magnetic fields created by traditional coil-based electric guitar pickups. To solve this problem, Gibson created a pickup based on piezo-electric crystals mounted to the wood of the soundboard. As the soundboard vibrates, the crystal creates an electric signal that can be amplified. The first piezo-electric pickup was introduced in 1969 and offered a very flat, natural response that suited the tastes of acoustic guitarists.

Read more: http://www.ehow.com/about_7217(...)Xdtkl

In 1963, experiments initiated by violinist John Berry and electronics visionary Les Barcus, gave birth to the first ever piezo crystal transducer for musical instruments. This discovery ultimately led to Barcus-Berry's introduction of several "firsts" in the music industry, such as the first electric violin, the first successful piezo transducers for guitar, piano and concert harp, the first commercially marketed active direct box, the first combination strap button/output jack and the first "under saddle" piezo pickup.
http://barcusberry.com/history.cfm

(...) The first piezo stype pickups showed up in the 1970's, and the leading manufacturer of them was Barcus-Berry. They were originally stick-on devices, and people started puttying and gluing them onto various places on and inside of acoustic instruments, with varying results. One thing they all shared was a need for some electronic help from a pre-amp, and a much-wider sound spectrum than an electric guitar amp could deliver. It turns out that they also has a different IMPEDANCE than electric guitar pickups, which made them less compatible when plugged into mixers, amps and even standard pre-amps. They tended to sound more like a "real guitar" than magnetic guitars pickups, though they also tended to feed back more. They also needed a PA system and not an electric guitar amp to sound their best.

Two advances in the 1980's allowed so called "acoustic" amplification to make a quantum jump forward. One was the "impedance buffering pre-amp" (whch the Fishman company was a leader in) and the other was the under-saddle or "thinline" style of piezo pickup. These tools allowed someone with an acoustic guitar to be vastly louder than a miked guitar or even a guitar amplified with a stick-on piezo pickup. This ushered in the era of the Ovation guitar and the use of so-called "acoustic" guitars in loud bands, which was impossible before. The Ovation guitar, made by Kaman, was (and still is) a very reliable, sturdy and feedback-resistant stage guitar that has an active pickup system, thinline style pickup, and can be heard over the din of even a rock band.
http://www.woodpecker.com/writ(...).html