GADGET AND HISTORY

A gadget is a small (tool) such as machine that has a particular function but is often thought of as a novelty. gadgets are sometime referred to as gizmos ...

HISTORY

The origins of the word "Good Jet " 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 are can't remember since the 1850s: with robert browns  1886 book spunyarn andspindrift, a sailor boy's log of a voyage out and home in a china tea-clipper containing the earliest known..

usage in print  the etymology of the word is disputed a widely  circulated story holds that the word gadget was "invented" when gadget, gauthier and cie, company behind the repousse 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 fact that it did not become popular at least in the USA , until after world war II other sources cite a derivation from the french gachette which has been applied to various pieces of a firing mechanism, a small tool or acessory..

the october 1918 issue of notes  and Queries contains a multi-article entry on the word "Gadget"(12s.iv187).H. tapley soper of the city library, exeter, writes.

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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 i common use throughout the country; and a naval officer who was present said that it has for year .been a popular expression on 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 friend to the collection of fitments to be seen on motor cycle his handle-bars are smothered in gadget' refers to such ting as speedometters, mirrors, lovers, badges, mascots, and attached to the steering handles, the"Jigger" or short-rest used in billiards is also of ten 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..

The usage of the term military parlance extended beyond the navy in the book "above the battle' by vivian drake published in 1918 by D. appleton and co.. of new york and London, being the memories of a pilot in the britiss royal flaying corps there is the following pasage, "Our ennui  war occasionally relived by new gadgets.." " gadget" is the flaying corps slang for invention! some gadgets were good , some comic and some extraordinary." 

By the second half of the twentieth century, the term "Gadget" had taken on the connotations of compactness  and mobility. in the 1965 assay' the great Gizmo" ( a term used  interchangeably with" gadget" throughout  the essay.). the architectural and design critic rayner banham defines the item  as:;

characteristic   class of  US products--perhaps the most characteristic -- is a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to ist size and cost. whose punction 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 my be ordered from catalogue  and delivered  to its  prospective user a class of servant to human needs. these clip-on  devices, these portable gadgets,  have colored American  thought and action far more deeply--I understood