I was chatting with a fellow bass player about my new line-up of effects pedals which my last gig enabled/required, and I commented that I had a "black rat fuzz" and when she looked at it she said, "oh, it's a rat clone! That's kinda more of a distortion."
Intrigued I investigated the subject of Fuzz, and apparently it all began with a happy accident in the recording of a Country Song called Don't Worry. Where the channel on the recording console had something gone bad in it.
This very same broken console circuit was used in the followup hit, The Fuzz.
Therefore, every Fuzz box is a clone of that original effect. Are there any pedals or units which are directly copied from the actual breakage of that original circuit? What happened in the change from 1 Fuzz to many Fuzzes? Who made the first clone and how did they do it?