guitars

Have you ever studied Samuel Goldwasser's PhotoFacts?

I have. I've actually studied it so many times that I know the typical failure mode of electronic components in almost any situation.

Amplifiers are powered by transistors (or tubes back in the day, not much difference). When they happen to be stressed to the point of failure, they practically always fail as a short circuit.

Short circuits aren't fun, that's why they invented the Variac to properly test suspicious devices.

Edit: I hate to repeat myself, but would you plug in a rusted toaster? Do you not value your life, or would you rather test the components and clean things up first?

I'm using the word antique a bit loosely here, as I don't know what year it was made. But obvious context clues tell me that the guitar definitely has some years behind it. There's the obvious corrosion, plus OP said they inherited it, meaning almost certainly the original owner has passed away.

I actually spent about 6 years as a guitar technician for a band that amongst other equipment rocked a Fender Stratocaster and dual 1000W Peavey stacks.

They'd never allow such a corroded guitar to hook up to their equipment willy-nilly without a full professional teardown, inspection, cleanup, any necessary parts and repairs, new strings, set the intonations, etc.

Maybe just maybe I've got a more professional attitude about it, from experience.

Hell, at bare minimum at least clean the old strings and spray some WD-40 into the tuner knobs and tune the thing up, can't tell much of anything about how an old guitar is supposed to sound if you don't at least try tuning it.

But I still wouldn't go plugging it into an amplifier without checking the internals first, for all I know it could end up shorting out and blowing a perfectly good amplifier.