The Steel Guitar Forum

Here's one for the "Slack Key" fraternity to consider, It's certain that the 3 Mexican wranglers (employed By King Kamehameha to teach the Hawaiians how to manage the herds of wild cattle roaming the islands) used GUT String guitars.
So just exactly WHEN did the Slack Key style start to use steel strings, and moreover aren't steel strings departing from the originality of the SOUND and style ?
See this for more details

AND, to further cloud the issue of the Hawaiian guitar, were the first ones (Played by Joseph Kekuku, Gabriel Davion and others) steel strung or gut ?

I doubt very much if gut strings were ever used much on Hawaiian guitars. Even on lutes and classical guitars, gut gave way to nylon aways back. (Yes, I do have a lute strung with gut strings.)
I also have a nylon-strung classical guitar with a high nut and bridge, and the tuners turned upside-down. I thought I was the only one who had done that.

Wire strings were available back in the 1700s.
"The Chitarra Battente did not have the customary gut strings, but used 5 courses of thin metal strings, often even with three strings per course. To stand the force of so many metal strings, the bridge was not glued to the front, but the strings ran over the loose bridge, to pins at the end of the body. To strengthen the construction, the part of the front lower than the bridge was made slanting (like on an Italian mandolin)." (Atlas of Plucked Instruments)

OK Alan, steel strings were common on various instruments earlier than the Hawaiian Guitar time-line, but Nylon was invented by Wallace Carothers in 1935.
Prior to Nylon was Cat gut, even though it really was sheep or goats intestine (which Casanova found another use for !!..)
According to many sources Steel Strung Guitars were not prevalent until steel guitar strings became readily available, and that was 1850 ish or even later outside of the USA and Europe..

Yes gut was indeed the material of non-steel-strung instruments until the 1940s. I put some new Aquila gut strings on my 20s Martin 3M uke and really like them. The seem to intonate better on the instrument. Martin guitars pre-1928 or so were also designed for gut strings. I can't comment on any of the Hawaiian players and techniques though, but I'd like to know too.

You might be interested to know that gut strings generally work at a higher tension than nylon strings. It's the opposite of what you might expect. As I build acoustic instruments, while I'm at the design stage, I have to do some arithmetic on the tension that the instruments are going to have to take, so that I can arrange the bracing accordingly.