Gadgetry - A functional and fictional device.

A functional and fictional device.

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What counted as a gadget at different moments in time and why?

Needs

An overwrought tool that ends up complicating the very task it's designed for. Seen as ridiculous by everyone but their user, for whom it fulfills a need they never knew they had. "Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity. Each day brings its addition of silks, trinkets, and shiny gadgets, new pleasure techniques and new pills for pep and painlessness."

–Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951)

Raygun

A fantastic or imaginary tool. An idea for an invention whose material prerequisites aren't yet available. "We do the serotonin diffraction in here. This room's plasma research. Remind me to bring you back sometime when the big centrifuge is running. Fascinating stuff.' . . . Harker puffed along behind the lab director, dazzled by the array of formidable and incomprehensible gadgetry, bewildered by the flow of unfamiliar terminology."

–Robert Silverberg, Recalled to Life (1972)

Gag

Various kinds of trivialities. A novelty item, gag gift, gimmick, magic trick, or toy. Embodied in the French phrase c'est du gadget for concepts that are gimmicky or just for fun. "Latest novelty to roll out of Hollywood--"Groucho Goggles." This plastic gadget for young and old fun-lovers makes everyone look, act, and sound like Groucho Marx, famed NBC quizmaster."

–The Plain Dealer, July 15, 1955

Wrinkle

Names the means or technique of solving a problem rather than the tool employed. Can also be a non-material idea or concept, or a material demonstration of a scientific concept. "I have found Americans out. They are gadget-minded. If they see a thing that needs to be done, they rig up a device, mechanical or mental, and make the thing do itself with no further bother. As a result, they have created a touch-the-button civilization, and I for one admire it. Why go on doing a thing in the same old way, over and over again, if we can make a robot do it for us, and do it better? My hat is of to the gadget mind."

–Joseph Newton, Living Every Day (1937)

Rig

A tool rigged together on the fly, made from available materials lying around. A prototype or stopgap. "Pliers, a file, and a pile of wire coat hangers are the only equipment and materials required for making a variety of wire articles useful in the home. For purposes in which rustproof qualities are important, gadgets can be constructed from galvanized hangers."

–Popular Science, September 1934

Gauge

An add-on, modification, accessory, or component to an existing tool, vehicle, or activity like photography or fishing. Especially a gauge that displays system status. "Imagine sitting outside a Dreadnought and trying to stabilise it with external gadgets, in the shape of water-ailerons worked by a lever from the bridge and a series of relay mechanisms! Incidentally, “automatically” stable machines, consisting of aeroplanes of the present type stabilised by means of gadgets such as gyroscopes, pendula, and so forth, do not seem very promising."

–Aeroplane and Commercial Aviation News, 1914

Cogs

An individual piece, cog, or component within a larger tool or system. "Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward into pipes — petrol, steam, and water — with a keen and searching eye. I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question. 'Not — in-the — least,' was the answer. 'Steam gadgets always take him that way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin’ to show a traction-engine haulin’ gipsy-wagons how to turn corners.'"

–Rudyard Kipling, "Steam Tactics," Saturday Evening Post (1902)

Lever

A lever or control mechanism used to operate a tool or system. "Over-confidence and eagerness to get going with the new outfit frequently induces people of newly purchased cameras to use the camera before they have read the instructions. The consequence too often is that something jams because some little gadget was not properly adjusted, although reference to a single line in the instructions would have avoided the accident."

–Scientific American, May 1940

Tool

A fully engineered, self-contained device or multitool, typically small, compact, utilitarian, and more often than not, inexpensive. Hand-powered and mechanical. "To beat the torrid summer heat and utilize every available short-cut to better homemaking, the up-to-date housewife is keeping the simple, inexpensive gadgets shown on these pages high on the 'buying list.'"

–Jet, July 28, 1955

Apparatus

An electronic instrument or system, a piece of media technology that remains fixed in place, like a stereo or answering machine. "The tapes that prompted Richard Nixon's Watergate resignation in 1974 might never have existed had he not been such a klutz with gadgets. Nixon was reluctant to have his conversations recorded, writes former Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman in Prologue, a National Archives publication. But if there had to be a taping system, the President said, he wanted something simple -- like Lyndon Johnson's manually operated setup. Haldeman was worried that his chief would forget to turn the gizmo on when he wanted it, or -- worse -- to turn it off when he didn't."

–Time Magazine, Sept 12, 1988

Mobile

A self-contained, portable, and hand-held electronic device such as a transistor radio or smartphone. "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do -- declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets -- one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness."

–Engadget, Dec 30, 2009

Miniature

A miniature object with no apparent or particular function. Also, a fashionable accessory, such as a lapel pin, or a bag. "Carole Lombard will have nary a jewel, never a wisp of ostrich, fringe or such clutter in her next film . . . you can’t miss allure if you follow Joan Crawford and sew all kinds and colors of silky hat flowers to a yard and a half of taffeta, and drape it over the shoulder to ward off sneezes when you step out to see how the moon is coming along . . . Smart gadget is Grace Moore’s cravat, a straight band of dress material, an inch and a half wide, tied in a flat knot, and used on both evening and sport things."

–Hollywood, July 1935

Vehicle

The entirety of a vehicle, usually an automobile or a ship. "A trial recently took place at Bristol (as reported in the Bristol Times and Mirror of 10 June) for damage done to a 'gadget.' The word does not occur in Halliwell, Smyth's 'Sailor's Word-Book,' or the 'H.E.D.' It evidently is the name of some kind of boat, which in the present case was used for the discharge of vessels in the harbour."

–Notes and Queries, 1899

Placeholder

A word that substitutes for the forgotten or ignored proper name of any given object. A word that signifies miscellany; sundry objects. "Opening night seats for all the plays I work on. The press agent offers them to his boss, the boss offers them to the president of the American Gadget Corporation, and the president of the American Gadget Corporation gives them to somebody else. Very seldom you can parlay a favour as much as that. Everybody's happy, and I get box seats for the ball games."

–John O'Hara, The Champagne Pool (1962)

Proper Name

Gadget used as the proper name for a particular object. "The tin tag in its present shape can not be used successfully on cotton banded with Churchill patented wire-tying machine, the 'Gadget,' but it would no doubt be made to conform to the new system. When the 'Gadget' comes into general use cotton would be so much more mercifully handled by stevedores in breaking out at destination port that the smooth patch and the paper bag will likely be found to accomplish the end aimed at."

–American Association of Local Freight Agents' Associations, 1909

Language

A standardized piece of rhetoric often used in business and political contexts. Can be a part of speech, or even a devious idea or scheme. "The machinery of propaganda is made of standardized gadgets by which you can detect it. One of these standard gadgets is slogans. The freeze the real process of thought. . . . One of these gadgets is to create fear by describing the horrors of invasion of the United States by foreign armies."

–Herbert Hoover, Addresses Upon the American Road (1949)

Miscellaneous

None of the above categories, an idiosyncratic usage. "But they did it again the next night in his room and the fiddler opened the door, his elasticized old-man gadgets dangling, and caught them at it. Stern, in an action he could not explain, carried her, without a word to the old man, out the window and to the garden below, and they never did that thing again."

–Hortense Calisher, Tales for the Mirror (1962)