A stringed instrument once created from a gourd, the guitar has made music for thousands of years, even though for many of us the instrument didn't really matter until the virtuosity of a dead bluesman named Robert Johnson influenced a new wave of English guitar players in the 1960s to plug it in and play it loud.

Whether it's of the modern electric variety or the ancient acoustic instruments, the guitar is a fascinating, iconic, and essential part of our culture. And now it has a touring exhibit to celebrate that and more in Guitar: The Instrument That Rocked the World, which opens Valentine's Day for a three-month run ending May 17 at Imagination Station, 1 Discovery Way in downtown Toledo.

"There are museums devoted to teacups, barbed wire, and ventriloquist dummies, but there was no museum devoted to the history and legacy of the guitar," said HP Newquist, executive director of the National Guitar Museum.

In 2009, Newquist and other partners decided to change that by opening the first permanent exhibit devoted to the guitar in Manhattan. The Great Recession, however, changed their plans, and they opted to tour much of their collection at various stops nationwide for the next several years as a testing ground of potential cities to house their permanent museum as early as 2020.

"We're traveling with 80 instruments, which is only one-third of the full display," Newquist said. “Two hundred and fifty guitars is our goal for the permanent installation."

Among those in the Imagination Station exhibit are the familiar Gibson Les Paul and Gibson Firebird, Fender Stratocaster and Fender Telecaster, as well as an electric guitar created from a 3-D printer, a "steampunk" guitar, the Ztar — a keyboard-like guitar which has a button for every fret and string (204 positions in all) — and exact replicas of the first pear-shaped guitars: Nyatiti from Africa, Tanbur from Persia, the Oud from Mesopotamia, and the Lute from Europe.

It was the latter that indirectly resulted in the curvy shape we know today, a classic design that apocryphally is the second most-recognized man-made shape in the world, trailing only the Coca-Cola bottle.

It started in 1400s Spain with the Viheula, with two primary theories regarding its birth, Newquist said.

One suggests the design came about as a political statement against former oppressors the Moors, who brought with them to Europe the Oud and the Lute. Once the crusaders drove the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula, all the Luthiers — those who made Lutes — agreed they needed to make their instrument in a new shape, one that didn't remind them of the exiled occupiers.

They settled on the female body — specifically the shoulders, waist, and hips — as inspiration.

"That way we will always be embracing, not only our music and our heritage, but the thing that we hold most dear, the Spanish woman," Newquist said.

The second theory drops the romantic sentiment in favor of practicability. The Viheula's curves were created to make the instrument easier to play: a carved-out bottom to rest on a knee and the a carved-out top to drape an arm over while strumming.

People like the first one better, Newquist said, but modern interpreters prefer the second version because it makes more sense.

"The history of the instrument is based on getting it to be more comfortable to play and to get it louder," he said. "Up until here it's about comfort. When we get into the 1900s it's about loudness."

In fact, things got really loud with the creation of the Rickenbacker A-22 Lap Steel, the first electric guitar, in 1932. The guitar was the brainchild of George Beauchamp (pronounced Beach-um), a lap steel guitar player in a Hawaiian music band who couldn't hear his own instrument over the rest of the group and singers.

Yes, Beauchamp wanted audiences to hear him play Hawaiian music, the most popular form of music in the nation in the 1920s and 1930s, and not a fuzzy, distorted guitar sound.

As Newquist said: "The electric guitar was created not for blues, not for rock and roll, but for Hawaiian music."

In addition to the dozens of guitars on display, Guitar: The Instrument That Rocked the World features hands-on exhibits demonstrating how guitars work, the evolution of its sound, and the technologies used to make the guitar.

This culminates in the grand attraction of the exhibit, the World's Largest Guitar, as certified by Guinness World Records, a 43½ feet long and 16 feet wide replica of a Gibson Flying V guitar, only 12 times larger, that's also fully playable.

So what does the Guitar: The Instrument That Rocked the World and its ancillary world's largest guitar have to do with a science museum?

Everything, said Lori Hauser, CEO of Imagination Station.

"The Science Center's mission is to inspire the wonder of science and technology and we do that through different vehicles," she said. "Bringing in an exhibition on science and sound via guitar meets that. ... We can talk about the materials that are used for it, the sound that comes out of it, the evolution of the guitar.

"It's similar to why we do snowflakes and why we do fireworks, and why we do different topics. It really broadens it. And who doesn't love the guitar?"

Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.

First Published February 12, 2015, 5:00 a.m.