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https://www.gibson.com/generation

Anyone know the history of the soundport?

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It's fun to scroll down and back up again to make the sound lasers shoot back up into the soundport. Pew! Pew pew!

On my browser, one has to accept the terms and conditions to see the advertisement. I don’t want to see it that bad.

It's "exclusive" to Gibson, don't you know. What's with the lines of white powder radiating out of the sound port? Maybe that guitar is a Clapton or J. J. Cale signature model.

They say the sound port on these guitars was inspired by the blueprint from 1964 shown on that page. That's interesting given that the circular sound port in the drawings appears to be at a rather unconventional location between the tail block and the tip of the lower bout, but instead the new guitars have an oval sound port at the totally conventional location on the upper bout.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

So instead of their sound port being ahead of the curve, it was kind of behind the curve?

We repaired a Martin that it's owner was carrying as he was running down the stairs and out of the house when a jealous lover fired a shot gun at him and hit the D-35 in it's green case instead.

I suspect that was the genesis of the sound port

To the best of my recollection the current interest in 'ports' started about twenty years ago, but it's not hard to find historical pictures of guitars with all sorts of added/moved sound holes. As is so often the case, it began as something that was hyped as the cure for every problem, and gradually, as we learned how these things really work, became an interesting feature that is useful in some circumstances. Gibson's work does seem to pre-date that, and may thus have garnered a patent, but I suspect it would not hold up in a court if it were challenged. I'm not sure it would be in anybody's economic interest to do so, though.

My own experiments suggest that a port down on the lower side of the hip could make a fairly substantial change in the sound out in front, but may not do much for the player. A port in the current 'normal' position, up around the wide part of the shoulder on the bass side, makes a decent high frequency monitor for the player, without otherwise altering the sound much. Any port will increase the strength of the low 'main air' resonance and raise the pitch some (as compared with the same guitar without it), but often the change in output power is not really audible. This being the guitar it's a lot more complicated than that, of course. I do have a 'port' paper on my web site for those interested.

It looks like they have a trademark on the name "Player Port" rather than a patent on the actual concept.

To paraphrase the Bard -
"A hole by any other name would sound as sweet"

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.