History
The origins of the word "gadget" trace back to the 19th century. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, there is anecdotal evidence for the use of "gadget" as a
placeholder name for a technical item whose precise name one can't remember since the 1850s; with Robert Brown's 1886 book
Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy’s log of a voyage out and home in a China tea-clipper containing the earliest known usage in print.
[2] The etymology of the word is disputed.
A widely circulated story holds that the word gadget was "invented" when Gaget, Gauthier & Cie, the company behind the
repoussé construction of the
Statue of Liberty
(1886), made a small-scale version of the monument and named it after
their firm; however this contradicts the evidence that the word was
already used before in nautical circles, and the fact that it did not
become popular, at least in the USA, until after World War I.
[2] Other sources cite a derivation from the French
gâchette which has been applied to various pieces of a firing mechanism, or the French
gagée, a small tool or accessory.
[2]
The October 1918 issue of
Notes and Queries contains a multi-article entry on the word "gadget" (12 S. iv. 187). H. Tapley-Soper of The City Library, Exeter, writes:
A discussion arose at the Plymouth meeting of the Devonshire Association
in 1916 when it was suggested that this word should be recorded in the
list of local verbal provincialisms. Several members dissented from its
inclusion on the ground that it is in common use throughout the country;
and a naval officer who was present said that it has for years been a
popular expression in the service for a tool or implement, the exact
name of which is unknown or has for the moment been forgotten. I have
also frequently heard it applied by motor-cycle friends to the
collection of fitments to be seen on motor cycles. 'His handle-bars are
smothered in gadgets' refers to such things as speedometers, mirrors,
levers, badges, mascots, &c., attached to the steering handles. The
'jigger' or short-rest used in billiards is also often called a
'gadget'; and the name has been applied by local platelayers to the
'gauge' used to test the accuracy of their work. In fact, to borrow from
present-day Army slang, 'gadget' is applied to 'any old thing.'[3]
The usage of the term in military parlance extended beyond the navy. In the book "Above the Battle" by
Vivian Drake, published in 1918 by D. Appleton & Co., of New York and London, being the memoirs of a pilot in the British
Royal Flying Corps,
there is the following passage: "Our ennui was occasionally relieved by
new gadgets -- "gadget" is the Flying Corps slang for invention! Some
gadgets were good, some comic and some extraordinary."
[4]
By the second half of the twentieth century, the term "gadget" had
taken on the connotations of compactness and mobility. In the 1965 essay
"The Great Gizmo" (a term used interchangeably with "gadget" throughout
the essay), the architectural and design critic
Reyner Banham defines the item as:
A characteristic class of US products––perhaps the most
characteristic––is a small self-contained unit of high performance in
relation to its size and cost, whose function is to transform some
undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human
desires. The minimum of skills is required in its installation and use,
and it is independent of any physical or social infrastructure beyond
that by which it may be ordered from catalogue and delivered to its
prospective user. A class of servants to human needs, these clip-on
devices, these portable gadgets, have coloured American thought and
action far more deeply––I suspect––than is commonly understood.[5]
Other uses
The first
atomic bomb was nicknamed
the gadget by the scientists of the
Manhattan Project, tested at the
Trinity site.
Application gadgets
In the software industry, "Gadget" refers to computer programs that
provide services without needing an independent application to be
launched for each one, but instead run in an environment that manages
multiple gadgets. There are several implementations based on existing
software development techniques, like
JavaScript, form input, and various image formats.
-
The earliest
[citation needed] documented use of the term
gadget in context of
software engineering was in 1985 by the developers of
AmigaOS, the
operating system of the
Amiga computers (
intuition.library and also later
gadtools.library). It denotes what other technological traditions call
GUI widget—a control element in
graphical user interface. This
naming convention remains in continuing use (as of 2008) since then.
The X11
[6] windows system 'Intrinsics'
[7]
also defines gadgets and their relationship to widgets (buttons, labels
etc.). The gadget was a windowless widget which was supposed to improve
the performance of the application by reducing the memory load on the X
server. A gadget would use the Window id of its parent widget and had
no children of its own
It is not known whether other software companies are explicitly
drawing on that inspiration when featuring the word in names of their
technologies or simply referring to the generic meaning. The word
widget is older in this context. In the movie "
Back to School"
from 1986 by Alan Metter, there is a scene where an economics professor
Dr. Barbay, wants to start for educational purposes a fictional company
that produces "widgets: It's a fictional product."
