For our younger readers, and those not privvy to the magic of steel guitar:
The quad-neck you see above was a precursor (and actually the inspiration for) today's pedal steel guitars. These were essentially as many lap steels as you wanted to build into a common chassis (you don't often see more than four), and each one is a different tuning. These were common in the 40's and 50's, and listen to country music that featured steel guitar, it was often these things. Steel guitars have never really ever settled into a common, standard format. They came from the Hawaiin guitar craze in the 30's, which usually were played on acoustic instruments in a Weissenborn format with crude pickups, or of course, Rickenbacker's original 'frying pan' lap steel.
Guys got tired of sitting down with them, and you began to see these come to the fore, though Gibson sold a 'console' style sit-down steel with piano-looking brass pedals for a brief time. Mr. Fender catered a lot to the country players on the West Coast, and so the double or triple-neck Fender stand-ups became catalog items for a while.
Here's a master of the 'stairstep' steels, the great Leon McCauliffe, one of the pillars of the Bob Wills Texas Playboys. This is the sort of steel you heard in those old records, like the Maddox Brothers and Rose or early Ernest Tubb or Jimmy Dickens.
Eventually, the thinking came along that you could have one neck with a pedal arrangement to sharp or flat individual strings, and began the pedal steel format we see today. Here's a Scandanavian player working up the Buddy Emmons transription of Elton's 'Blue Eyes'. This has become like learning 'Teentown' or 'School Days' for us in the steel community. Stunning.
