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.

◎ ◎ ◎ ◎ ◎ ◎ ◎

Year: 1922

Quote: “I think that many an officer, when he first studies the mooring board at the Naval Academy, or rather when he is supposed to study it, is at once impressed with its resemblance to a huge spider web, contrived by the devilish ingenuity of man for the purpose of hopelessly enmeshing the poor fly–which is himself. […] In either case, if the ship has to shift berth, the tendency is to damn the mooring board as an impracticable ‘gadget,’ and to fail to criticize the manner of its use. Thus when it comes to a consideration of the less obvious manuvering problems, he is prone to dismiss the whole matter with the assertion tha, like the Peace of God, it ‘passeth all understanding.’ […] When speaking of mooring board problems, I think not so much of the board itself as of the kind of work involved. Such problems may be worked out on the actual board, or in many cases on a chart, or perhaps on some kind of specially contrived ‘gadget.’ […] I have a gadget I use for maneuvering problems instead of the printed forms, locally known as the ‘Wegee Board,’ because it is supposed to predict the future and explain the past. It is a sheet of white celluloid with an 18”circle on it graduated in degrees. At the center is the point of a thumb tack inserted from the bottom side and filed down till it barely projects above the board.”

Author: Stiles, Commander William C.I

Source: v48n7. July 1922.

Year: 1927

Quote: “An Industrial Expert Tells Why Manufacturers Must Seek New Inventions to Keep Their Wheels Turning. […] “‘Our experience with inventors and with manufacturers indicates that there is a tremendous amount of inventive effort going to waste. A great deal of free-lance inventing means that the poor inventor spends a vast amount of time and thought and often hard-earned savings working up some useless gadget that nobody will have. “The inventor must realize that the first requisite of any new invention is that there be a possibility of broad human need underlying it, and ma­ chinery for its distribution that can be made to turn without spending a small fortune. Let him remember the really outstanding inventions and think of them not as mechanical creations but as things that made it possible for humanity to ride where it had walked; to bridge space with conversation where it formerly required days to transmit messages. / Let him remember Gillette’s safety razor. The money on this invention has been made not through the razor but the blades. / Gillette’s funda­mental idea from which that invention sprung was that he wanted to get something for which there would be un­ limited repeat business. His hitting upon a blade that could be used and thrown away was a real stroke of genius. / This element of need is the thing that has been fundamental in inventions which have won commercial success. Before he spends a lot of time, therefore, let the inventor check up on the potential market.”

Author: Wright, Milton

Source: Scientific American 137, (December 1927). 513-515

Year: 1933

Quote: “Don’t take camping too seriously—after all, it is an adventure. In these days of convenient equipment, it is a temptation to provide this and that modern gadget, until finally a-camping we go with our cars laden down with everything but the electric refrigerator and washing machine. All of which does something to that gypsy spirit which lures us out into the open. / Let’s go camping, but let’s leave everything at home that we can get along with out.”

Author:

Source: Wyandotte Echo (Kansas City, Kansas) • 01-20-1933 • Page PAGE [FOUR]

Year: 1936

Quote: “In reading through “the glossy pages of a large and costly monthly” magazine… “In absorbed fascination I read these slyly contrived proffering of wares, and I became aware as I read these slyly contrived profferings of wares, and I became aware, as I read, that almost all the advertised products–although as physically various as ice-boxes and pens, underwear and cigar-lighters–had a certain common aspect. Almost all of them, in a word, were gadgets. / A gadget is not easy to define. It is a kind of what’s or thingumabob or dingus–all these excellent slang words being themselves, alas, rather nebulous and indefinable. The fact that it is indefinable may be, I suspect, the clue to the gadget’s nature. The gadget, in short, is a gadget; which is to say that it is not definable in terms of its relation to the real life and basic pursuits of man. A ‘hat’ we may define; it is an object to keep the human head warm or dry or shaded or otherwise comfortable. We may readily enough define food or drink or books or houses. But the gadget…” (590) / “I hear complaints and repinings now and again that in this age philosophy is dead. But I do not think so. There has simply been substituted, for other philosophies, the philosophy of the gadget. This philosophy is but materialism carried to a somewhat attenuated but entirely logical extreme. It is the ultimate, and rather pathetic, expression of acquisitiveness. […] We have deified gadgets, precisely as we have tended more and more to make material concerns for ultimates of our thinking. For that modern temper which delights ‘to pay devout and uncritical obeisance to the analytic intelligence,’ disclaiming every other human faculty of apprehension, and which–being beset by economic woes–is obsessed by economic criteria of values, and by those alone, it would be hard to find a more fitting symbol and insignia than The Gadget.” “That we seek to appease this gnawing sense of want and incompleteness by devising newer and queerer and more elaborate gadgets is not more ridiculous than sad. It is part of the flight from reality, or rather, perhaps, of the refusal to face reality steadfastly and with full realization.” Goes to a “dream of some day about the year 5000” when archaeologists explore “the subterranean ruins of a great twentieth-century city,” uncovering miserable tabloids chronicling war, “night clubs,” and the horrors of… ::gasp:: stand up comedy! “And then, in this dream, I see the leader of the archaeological party pounce with delight upon a small object in the dust, and I hear him cry ‘Here is their sacred talisman, the symbol of their religion!’ and I see him hold up to his conferères a cigar-lighter with the recipes for eight cocktails printed on it, and with a fountain-pen at one end of it and a flashlight at the other.”

Author: Devoe, Alan

Source: Catholic World. August, 1936. p. 590-1

Year: 1938

Quote: “Electricity has so recently revolutionized lighting that everyone is now conscious of the problems involved in balancing correct light with attractive lighting. Although much of the recent talk about correct lighting is simply propaganda for gadgetry, the new interest in light makes it easier to investigate? and to solve? the difficulty of combining beauty and use in artificial light.”

Author: Maas, Carl

Source: Greenburg: Publisher, New York

Year: 1939

Quote: “During the few months of delay required by Henry to get his factory force and his advertising force and his sales force organized, expectation and curiosity rose high. Nobody knew what the gadget was to be, except that it was rumored that it was to be extremely gadgetish. Henry, in the meantime, cleverly whetted the public curiosity by putting up along the most frequented monkey-paths in the jungle signs such as these: BRING SUNSHINE IN TO THE FAMILY NEXT / BUY A GADGET – AND IT DOES THE REST. A COCOANUT, A COCOANUT, A COCOANUT A DAY / WILL BUY YOUR WIFE A GADGET AND KEEP THE FROWNS AWAY.” turns out to be a cocoanut opener: “The Guenon Perfection Automatic Cocoanut Decapitator.” “It was so much more esthetic to have neatly decapitated cocoanuts, instead of the old kind that merely had their tops bashed in with a rock, that no self-respecting monkey-family dared serve any other kind. And besides that, the gadget was such fun to play with. Many a previously-industrious husband would stay at home half the morning fooling with the Decapitator when he ought to have been out picking cocoanuts for the support of his family.”

Author: Ficke, Arthur Davison

Source: Coronet. v6n3. July, 1939. p. 29

Year: 1939

Quote: “who can assist by reason of the right contacts with large business interests, in exploring an invention as universally applicable as steam. A test plant is nearly completed and together with the patent situation amply financed. This is not another gadget but something of epoch-making importance. There is nothing like it in existence and the art is susceptible of profitable development in a hundred directions for years to come. The man is more important than the $5,000 which he must be prepared to lose, but the chances are better than 50% for him to make a million, if the test plant operates, and extensive and expensive research and independent checking indicate it will.”

Author:

Source: Scientific American 160, (June 1939) p. 372-389

Year: 1940

Quote: “Our monumental work on the Theory of Gadgets which has been, as they say, on the stocks for twenty years, is nearing completion. But so, apparently, is civilization [gallows humor in the lead-up to war…]. And in case our publication date does not succeed in anticipating the final crash of Armageddon, we would like to give you a few hints of what these volumes would have contained. / Everybody knows what a gadget is, and yet a definition is hard to find. After deep thought, we give you this: A gadget is anything which, designed to simplify life, actually complicates it. We are fully aware that this definition is almost revolutionary in its comprehensiveness. Yet it is tenable. It includes everything from a battleship to a fountain pen. It includes the cigarette lighter that is always running dry, the electric icebox that springs a sulphur leak when eight guests are waiting for cocktails, the automatic shocke that saves two seconds in starting your car every day for thirty days, and on the thirty-first robs you of two hours of your time and two dollars of your money. It includes most of the things you give your friends for Christmas, And [sic] all that you get. / In our chapter on Man and the Gadget, we show how man, the eternal sucker, progresses from enthusiasm to disillusion, repeatedly, all his life long–for the gadget has no experience value. Elsewhere we estimate the time and money spent on the invention, manufacture, sale, operation, and final frenzied destruction of gadgets. We list al known gadgets, showing the difference between promise and performance. And finally, we paint a picture of a gadget-less Utopia, with a few practical hints on how to attain it. / The difficulty in completing this work has been in our gadget-testing department. For obviously, if a single gadget is really found to simplify life, it nullifies our whole argument. And new gadgets appear daily. We were ready this morning to write finis–when we read of the new false teeth plates which have magnets set in them, with like poles opposing, to keep upper and lower plates apart and in place. We have always insisted on doing all testing ourself. Yet we still retain most of our original teeth, and are reluctant to sacrifice them, even to add the final proof to our theory. For if the magnets don’t work, we have, it is true, the proof, but are just where we were before, and with nothing to chew with. And if they do work, a lifetime of effort is undone.”

Author: Brooks, Walter

Source: Scribner’s Commentator. February, 1940. v7n4. p. 42

Year: 1941

Quote: “Our man in charge of detecting trade-marks reports a wide-spread craze for compounds ending in “matic.” The word ‘automatic’ is presumably the father to these coinages, since they all seem intended to carry a connotation of self-propulsion. It is not a new idea. Oil-O-Matic, which may have been the first, has been the trade-mark for the Williams oil burner for a number of years. Within the last twelve months or so, however, the style has suddenly and for no apparent reason become extravagantly popular. / The automobile industry has been particularly prolific along these lines. One manufacturer feathers the Hydramatic drive, another the Electromatic clutch, another Powermatic shifting, a fourth the Simplimatic transmission. The newest models bring the Liquimatic drive and the Turbo-matic drive. / The vogue is also extensive in the electrical appliance field. Examples include the Vis-O-Matic, Aire-Matic and Attach-O-Matic sweepers; the Laundrimatic, Spira-Matic and ABC-O-Matic washers; the Electro-Matic and Touch-O-Matic radios. There is a Tel-A-Matic iron, and also an Adjust-O-Matic and a Steam-O-Matic. The Ade-O-Matic keeps things warm on the Center-Matic stove while the Coffeematic processes the java. Workers in industry ply Multi-matic and Camatic tools, while the Shift-o-matic is an electric typewriter carriage return. / Miscellaneous adaptations privilege the consumer to ride on Seal-O-Matic inner tubes; to sit hygienically in a Postur-Matic chair; to wear Glide-O-Matic arch resters while pushing a baby cab equipped with an Adjustmatic gear. What’s more you can painlessly purchase any or all of the above articles on the Buy-O-Matic loan plan. And if there is anything left for taxes, you can figure the amount with the Tax-O-Matic income tax chart. / It could have been considered inevitable that somebody would come up with Matho-Matic. Sure enough, somebody did. It’s the name for the nozzle on the Premier vacuum cleaner. So far as we know, Roomatic remains unclaimed. / P.S. At this very moment, Junior may be at large with the recently introduced Squirt-O-Matic water pistol.”

Author:

Source: Printers’ Ink, October 24, 1941. vol. 197, p. 88

Year: 1943

Quote: “…gadgets that are being foisted upon the school budget were the inventions of teachers, growing out of their needs, I would try to appreciate them. But they are in truth, in most cases, being resisted by the teachers and they are…”

Author:

Source: Education, vol. 63. 1943

Year: 1946

Quote: “Plastics’ postwar garb is man-size stuff worthy of materials that can swing their weight around in the industrial big leagues. … In view of these facts, can you blame the industry for being a little irate over any interpretation of plastics as something out of which lipstick holders and all sorts of gadgets are made? … ‘Let’s not talk about new plastic gadgets,’ pleaded a spokesman for the Dow Chemical Company recently. ‘Every manufacturer is being pushed at the present time to produce enough plastics for practical purposes.””

Author: Whittaker, Wayne

Source: Popular Mechanics. Sep 1946. 145-149

Year: 1948

Quote: “Men receive sturdy, practical gadgets which they will prize. All are designed to answer a man’s need for something he has wanted. Generally his gifts will lean toward the mechanical or business side. At any rate, you can bet he’ll be happy with a membership in the Gadget-of-the-Month Club.” “Women receive useful, colorful and practical gadgets which they can use around the house, or perhaps on their person. Some gadgets have been unique household tools which have miraculously solved culinary headaches. Women are among the most enthusiastic members of the Gadget-of -the-Month Club.” Later, ad for “war surplus gadgets, heater relays, radio test filaments, electric trains, house chimes, etc.” Ad for “Gadget Mix,” $1.19 a bag. Another ad for “Catalog of 7000 Novelties.” “World’s biggest catalog of amazing gifts, novelties, gadgets, fun makers”

Author:

Source: Popular Science, Nov. 1948.

Year: 1948

Quote: “Everybody has his own pet idea of some gadget he would like to see in general use. What is YOURS? Popular Science will pay $5.00 for each one published. Use government postcards only. Contributions cannot be acknowledged or returned.”

Author:

Source: Popular Science, November 1948

Year: 1949

Quote: “He tried to sell insurance of a while after that… ‘on commission’ again. Unquote! Then he’d taken on some electric appliances and gadgets, house to house. But people didn’t want gadgets. What’s more, housewives got so sick of opening the door to real panhandlers they got so they wouldn’t open them to anybody have the time.”

Author: Lynde, H. H.

Source: Crown Publishers: 1949.

Year: 1949

Quote: “A gadget is a device for doing something that nobody knew needed doing until a gadget was invented to do it. As Actor Clifton Webb found out, discovering what a new gadget actually does is not always easy. When Don Davis of the Gadget-of-the-Month Club of Los Angeles, Calif., which sends a gimmick monthly to half a million subscribers, handed Webb the enigmatic tubular gizmo shown here, Webb was nonplused. Nevertheless he accepted the challenge of figuring out what it was. For 20 minutes he struggled manfully to make it do something useful without ever tumbling to its real purpose. He twisted it and turned it, applying it to various parts of his anatomy with no success. Finaly he even tried to make it fit his dog. Then, baffled and frustrated, he gave up. But Webb did learn the doodad’s proper use eventually, just as can anyone else by turning the page.” … “It’s a bathtub cane to prevent oldsters, cripples and cautious people from slipping. Impressed with what he saw, Webb wanted one for his mother.”

Author:

Source: Life, Jan 31, 1949.

Year: 1950

Quote: “Its owners were mighty proud of their new gadgets. They were proud because their new gadgets were time-saving. Chaplin was horrified because they were also man- killing. The superiority of gadget to man, the slavery of man to gadget,…”

Author:

Source: The Atlantic Monthly. vol. 185. 1950.

Year: 1950

Quote: “DO’S and DONT’S–“If you can afford it, those gadgets do make work easier.””

Author:

Source: Arkansas State Press (Little Rock, Arkansas) • 01-06-1950 • Page 4

Year: 1950

Quote: “You don’t have to be an engineer to cook on a NATURAL GAS stove. Mothers can even teach young daughters in a minimum of time to master the art of flame cooking. There are no gadgets and buttons to push, no restless waiting for proper cooking temperatures. A flick of the wrist brings the desired heat instantly. It’s that easy and that simple.”

Author:

Source: Arkansas State Press (Little Rock, Arkansas) • 12-08-1950 • Page 11

Year: 1951

Quote: “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.”

Author: McLuhan, Marshall

Source: The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. New York: The Vanguard Press, Inc. p. 140

Year: 1952

Quote: “Your issue on automatic control is a vivid portrayal of a materialistic culture in which bright young men study engineering instead of philosophy. Only two authors (the first and last) weigh the tremendous problems that will follow the advances described by the other six. Each of these two speaks with the circumspection of one who elects to drift with the current rather than inquire too critically as to its direction. Less inhibited philosophers–say Bertrand Russell, Karl Menninger, Julian Huxley, Henry Thoreau and Philip Wylie–have been genuinely worried that so much genius is directed at producing more and better gadgets rather than improving the aims, morals and happiness of man him­ self, a field commonly left to opportunists and superstition-mongers. Is it not cause for alarm that Nobelists in peace­ unlike those in physics or medicine­ have often been conspicuous only by their absence? Or that such a basic human urge as pride of achievement (the family piano) is steadily giving ground to pride of ownership (the family television)?” “

Author:

Source: Scientific American 187, (November 1952). p. 2-6

Year: 1952

Quote: “Here is where parents enter the picture. Dope provides the user with an escape from realities, and in this sense, parents themselves are often guilty of ‘doping’ themselves by buying cars, television sets, expensive clothes, gadgets and other things they can’t afford, giving themselves a false feeling of security.”

Author: White, Laureen

Source: Arkansas State Press (Little Rock, Arkansas) • 06-20-1952 • Page 4

Year: 1953

Quote: “It is the willingness to sacrifice that forces itself on our attention at this time. Like all Americans, we seem too anxious to buy gadgets and conveniences that we should do without. All too many of the oppressed of the earth use such conveniences as opiates. A group of people that are always the last hired, the first fired, and are always relegated to the least desirable jobs, should be careful how they spend their money when they get it.”

Author: White, Laureen

Source: Arkansas State Press (Little Rock, Arkansas) • 05-15-1953 • Page 6

Year: 1953

Quote: ““No Pushbutton Gadgets for Us–We Had REAL Stoves!” “ But who chopped the wood and emptied the ashes?” … In contrast, her modern granddaughter uses electrical “servants” to do tedious household chores. She pushes a button or turns a dial to cool or heat the house, cook a meal, wash the laundry and grind the garbage.”

Author:

Source: The Plain Dealer (Kansas City, Kansas) • 05-29-1953 • Page 4

Year: 1955

Quote: “In speaking from the subject “Keepers of the Flame,” Rev. Gibson made the observation that “. . . We are overwhelmed by the things we have learned to do in our modern world. It is an exciting age of trinkets and gadgets, but there is a danger in it all - - the danger that we might come to the point where we say to God ‘Look, God, see what we have done, what we can do without You.’ We must not however lose a sense of direction and miss the deeper meaning of life.””

Author:

Source: Arkansas State Press (Little Rock, Arkansas) • 11-11-1955 • Page 7

Year: 1956

Quote: “My new pipe is not a new model, not a new style, not a new gadget, not an improvement on old style pipes. It is the first pipe in the world to use an ENTIRELY NEW PRINCIPLE for giving unadulterated pleasure to pipe smokers. … all the disappointing gadgets… You might expect all this to require a complicated mechanical gadget…”

Author:

Source:

Year: 1956

Quote: “John had been fortunate in employment, he had a good job, and recently had been promoted to supervising manager of the department in which he worked. This was the type of work he had always wanted, and now he was set. The modest home which they were buying was almost paid for. He had been able to surround his family with every normal comfort and gadget which the above-average wage earner could afford. Yet John was unhappy.”

Author:

Source: Plain Dealer (Kansas City, Kansas) • 05-18-1956 • Page 7

Year: 1956

Quote: “Standard cooking equipment for the bride today is a can opener and a pack of safety matches. / Our legs grow weak and our bottoms big with riding. Only the small children still walk and run in their play and have the imagination to invent fun without a multitude of gadgets, instruction and supervision. / Formulas and pre-fabrication are robbing us of the inventiveness that have made Americans famous the world over. Soft foods, television, and movies are almost making false teeth and eye glasses standard equipment. The ever-continuing quest for more and more money with which to buy more and more time and labor-saving gadgets is creating an age of dissatisfied neurotics.”

Author: Saunders, Joe

Source: Crusader (Rockford, Illinois) • 07-06-1956 • Page [1]

Year: 1958

Quote: “Technological innovations have been as important as language, art and science in distinguishing man from beast. And although technological innovation antedates our species, it has never before occupied so great a share of man’s energies. / Our works are built on old foundations––on obsolete inventions such as the hand-ax and the bow no less than on inventions that have survived, such as agriculture and the wheel. But during most of human history technological art accumulated gradually. Up to a few hundred years ago, the techniques of civilized life had scarcely advanced beyond the best achievements of the ancients. Then our control over the forces of nature began to increase at an explosive rate. […] In this article we shall examine some recent advances to see what light they throw on the creative process in the complex of technology today. What do we mean by technological innovation? Surely not the tail fins on this year’s automobile, nor a new catch on a refrigerator door. A true innovation must perform some important function. It may do a wholly new job or do an old job far better or far more cheaply than it was done before. […] …I will discuss some reasonably noncontroversial innovations made at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where I am employed, under circumstances which I believe I understand. […] As our final example of innovation in technology let us consider briefly the microwave-relay system which carries telephone conversations and television programs across the country without the use of cables. The key word here is ‘system.’ The problem was not to make a particular device, but to weld a great number of devices into a complex whole. Some of the deices were available at the start; others had to be developed. But the chief innovation was the choice, among the many alternative methods and devices, of the best combination of methods and devices–the system as a whole, and not merely its adequate parts. […] [Harold T.] Friis’s main problem, then, was not to invent this gadget or that, but to choose the best course, technically and economically, among a bewildering array of possibilities. The art of making such a choice is usually called systems engineering when the alternative means and the required knowledge are all at hand. When they are not, I suppose it should be called systems research. By 1948 the results of the research of Friis and his colleagues had been embodied in an experimental system which was installed between New York and Boston. This was the prototype of the transcontinental microwave system, which was put into service in 1951.”

Author: Pierce, John R.

Source: Scientific American 199, (September 1958). p. 116-133

Year: 1958

Quote: “You hear a lot about automation these days—electric eyes that spot bad parts, magnetic tapes that control giant “brains,” push-buttons that guide machines, but the backbone of this country is still manpower. It takes 67 million of us to keep industry and commerce spinning. / This thought was brought home to me a few weekends ago when I took my car to Joe’s garage. I’ve been doing business with Joe for 15 years. In that time, his garage has changed considerably. At the beginning, Joe had only a grease pit and a hydraulic lift. Today, he has a battery of machines and meters he uses in diagnosing my car’s ills. / On this business of automation I asked Joe if servicing my car hadn’t become a lot easier with the “gadgets” he now had. / Of course, Joe said. These new devices helped since automobile machinery has become so highly complex. But he told me that there wasn’t one thing any machine could do for my car if he didn’t stay abreast of automotive servicing techniques. … I also realize that all the automation in the world can’t do the job without him. It made me realize that no electronic brain could ever replace my mechanic’s horsepower horse sense.”

Author: Willkens, Dudley

Source: Arkansas State Press (Little Rock, Arkansas) • 04-04-1958 • Page 5

Year: 1958

Quote: “But not enough has been done with me, and I am hopelessly caught in the treadmill and cannot do as much as ought to be done with my children to make them better people. And so all of the rich iron-ore of human experiences goes for naught, and we do not make the better people we ought to make, without which the “better things for better living” are just gadgets, no more capable of making better lives than better can openers are of affecting the state of mind of the average housewife. / In my case, I have an apparent inability to learn from previous depressions. / “Pre-menstrual tension,” the doctor calls what may be one aspect of it. But although experience has proved him right, I am always, in the midst of one, convinced that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And I am absolutely certain that this is absolutely the end.”

Author: Lomax, Almena

Source: Los Angeles Tribune (Los Angeles, California) • 10-03-1958 • Page 8

Year: 1959

Quote: “…the intellectual climate of our time. We tend to think in terms of mass production and of gadgets. As far as production of commodities is concerned this has proven exceedingly fruitful. But if the idea of mass production and gadget worship is transferred to the problem of man and into the field of psychiatry it destroys the very basis which makes producing more and better things worth while.”

Author: Fromm, Erich

Source: p. 98

Year: 1959

Quote: “A poem, “A Mixed Up World”, by Andy Razaf, famous composer and lyricist who lives in Los Angeles, was included in the Appendix of the Congressional Record last week at the request of Razaf’s former congressman, Frank C. Osmers, Jr., of New Jersey. … Too Long have we worshipped material things, / With our eyes on worthless goals, / Improving our Gadgets and Machines; / But not improving our Souls.”

Author: Razaf, Andy

Source: Los Angeles Tribune (Los Angeles, California) • 03-06-1959 • Page 21

Year: 1959

Quote: “The common, traditional tools of Japan are handsome, easy-to-use and often more logical than our ‘do-it-yourself’ gadgets. This saw, for example, cuts on the pull—utilizing the scientific principle that steel in tension cuts more easily!”

Author: Nelson, George

Source: Arkansas State Press (Little Rock, Arkansas) • 05-08-1959 • Page 10

Year: 1959

Quote: “The other thing we want to tell Khrushchev is that if, as the Los Angeles Times says, he is just coming to the United States to be “properly guided and illuminated” so that he will learn that his country does not have anywhere near as much “consumer goods” as the United States has, he should have ‘stood in bed.’ / “Consumer goods”, Nikita, are not all they are cracked up to be, and your people are better off with only half as much as the United States has, especially if they work. / Now, take the American can opener . . . or maybe it has a “made in Jjapan” label, we don’t know. We only know that we buy it at the super market for $1.29 and it has a life expectancy at peak performance of about six weeks. / After that, it takes a Hercules to get the thing to sink its teeth in a can, and then to cling while we laboriously turn the handle, hoping the teeth don’t get tired and ease their bite until the circle is completed. . . . And then, what happens? The top sinks down into the peach or pineapple juice to come to rest right on top of the fruit. . . . whereupon we have to perform an engineering feat with a knife or a fork to get it up out of the can, again. […] For it will become undoubtedly crystal clear to Nikita after he has toured the United States that American consumption of twice as much meat as the Russians has turned them into a lot of meatheads. . . . And then he will go home and release the necessary number of farm hands to build better moons and rockets, also can openers, and other gadgets, and thus, move the date for outstripping the U. S. up from the Times’ optimistic “1970s” to the 1960s. / Really, aside from the “h’s”, our only word of advice for Nikita is about the can openers. . . . They better work, or comes the revolution, his head will be the first to roll.”

Author:

Source: Los Angeles Tribune (Los Angeles, California) • 09-18-1959 • Page 12

Year: 1959

Quote: “Faculty and students of Hampton Institute were warned last week that “our society, with its love of gadgets, its worship of bigness, its curious fear of novelty and its demands for conformity, is in danger of destroying the individual and thus of destroying itself in the end. / Dr. J. Harry Cotton, chairman, Division of Humanities, Wabash college, Crawfordsville, Indiana, was the speaker, addressing the formal opening of the college’s 92nd academic year.”

Author:

Source: Los Angeles Tribune (Los Angeles, California) • 10-09-1959 • Page 24

Year: 1960

Quote: “Never have Snow’s twin warnings, of the danger of thinking that one weapon will solve our problems, and of the illusion that one can rely on maintaining technical superiority, been more vividly illustrated by the early years of nuclear weapons. Here the euphoria both of gadgets and of secrecy reached their highest and most disastrous intensity. Through a blind obeisance to a single weapon the West let down the strength of its conventional forces and failed even to develop prototypes of modern weapons for land warfare.”

Author: Blackett, P.M.S.

Source: Scientific American 204, (April 1961). p. 191-205

Year: 1961

Quote: “Also, who is to judge at the outset whether a gadget invention is not worthy of a patent? The telephone, telegraph, movie, radio and television were regarded as mere ‘gadgets’ in their early stages. In fact, nearly all basic inventions must necessarily go through the ‘gadget’ stage. The Patent Office policy of resolving doubts in favor of the inventor is thus sound. It encourages investment which promotes industrial progress.”

Author: Rossman, Michael

Source: ed. William B. Ball. Journal of the Patent Office Society. v. 43. 1961. p. 799.

Year: 1961

Quote: “Public needs are underfinanced while private tastes are overindulged? that is the proposition. The two parts of the proposition seem neatly to complement each other? too much of one, therefore too little of the other. In fact they don’t. It is one thing to be irritated by certain manifestations of our contemporary civilization? the gadgets, the chrome, the tailfins, and the activities that go with them. It is quite another? and something of a non sequitur? to conclude from this that the only alternative to foolish private spending is public spending. Better private spending is just as much of a possibility. My contention here will he that to talk in terms of “ public vs. private “ is to confuse the issue. More than that, it is to confuse means and ends.”

Author: Wallich, Henry Christopher

Source: Harpers: 1961-10 p. 12-25

Year: 1963

Quote: “THE THIRD major criticism is that Americans are materialists. “ The only things that interest them are their gadgets. They have no spiritual life, no culture, no traditions. Their God is the almighty dollar. When you visit their country, the guides always tell you how big a thing is, how much it cost. And when Americans visit a country like Greece, they stop in front of the Acropolis and ask, How much did this cost to build?’ They adore statistics, and put blind faith in them. Their over-accelerated pace of life leaves no time for beauty or sentiment”

Author: Maurois, Andre

Source: Reader’s Digest: 1963: January: 79-83

Year: 1965

Quote: “Prosperity came late to Finland, “ he said, “ because until recently the Soviets got every penny we earned as war reparations. Perhaps that was an advantage. We could learn from your mistakes. When we finally caught up. we asked ourselves: What are we to do with our new affluence? We can’t eat more. There is a Iimit to the automobiles and gadgets we really need. So I started to persuade my countrymen that we should build a beautiful and suitable environment for everyone. Good housing is not enough. We have to counteract the strains and tensions of modern urban life.”

Author: von Eckardt, Wolf

Source: Harpers: 1965-12 p. 85-94

Year: 1965

Quote: “Since there are degrees of illness and of skill needed in handling them, he will resume his rightful role in the medical constellation and will guide his patients through the growing complexities of health care. By being freed of the burden of an overcrowded schedule, he will have time for thorough examination and history taking. He will depend on the acuity of his educated powers of observation even more than on gadgets to detect the danger signals of any possible deviation from the normal. A grounding in clinical psychiatry will enable him to evaluate and treat common emotional stresses that are often at the root of organic disease.”

Author: Greenberg, Selig

Source: The MacMillan Company, New York

Year: 1968

Quote: “French, in borrowing the English word ‘gadget’, lays far more stress than English-speakers generally do on the connotation for which a gadget is an object, such as a novelty item, with no function or use value. It is with this emphasis that the author uses the term here and throughout the present work.” (7) And as for using the word “gizmo”: “I have used ‘gizmo’ for the French catch-all term ‘machin,’ whose close kinship to the French ‘machine’ is thus not apparent in the English (123)”

Author: Benedict, James

Source: Beaudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects / Le systéme des objets

Year: 1968

Quote: “The situation is particularly alarming in view of the vested interests that already exist with respect to the development and sale of privacy-invading devices and procedures. Perhaps even more alarm­ing are two attitudes that, it seems to me, underlie the speed with which some of the privacy-invading practices have taken root, and that are likely to be the basis for a continuing demand for them. The first attitude can be characterized as an infatuation with gadgets and procedures that appear, at least to the layman, to be scientific. This attitude seems to lead people to fit problems and objectives to the tools that happen to be available. The second attitude, encouraged by an all too human desire to avoid personal responsibility for decisions is a preference for data and procedures that lend themselves to mechanization, in the belief that the elimination of human judgment is in itself desirable. I am reminded here of what the late Norbert Wiener used to say (as far back as 1950) with regard to the use of computers. He stressed that the greatest danger lies in our delegating to computers, out of ignorance or mental laziness, decisions that should remain ours.”

Author: Fano, R. M.

Source: Scientific American 218, (May 1968). p. 149-159

Year: 1968

Quote: “A factor forcing this gamble is what may be called the “space-industrial complex.” / Lapp states: / “The aerospace industries grab half of prime military contract awards. And they are concentrated in sensitive areas like California and Texas. … It had a peak force of 11,000 workers — many from New Orleans.” / In other words, the more gadgets we send up and the more the space program expands, the richer will the aerospace industries be. / … Nossiter quotes Samuel F. Downer, the financial vice-president for LTV Aerospace, which produces space and military equipment. / Downer states: “If you’re president and you need a control factor in the economy and you sell this factor, you can’t sell Harlem and Watts but you can sell self-preservation, a new environment. We’re going to increase defense budgets as long as those bastards in Russia are ahead of us. The American people understand this.” / The producers of arms and space paraphernalia are naturally for the arms races. And as long as the American people uncritically support these ventures, we will continue to recklessly risk the lives of spacemen and combatants, and we will never get around to the much more urgent tasks of solving Watts and Harlem.”

Author:

Source: Soul City Times (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) • 12-21-1968 • Page Page Sixteen

Year: 1968

Quote: “other teaching aids, a camera-equipped mechanical phallus. Experiment places its research project, supplied with similar equipment, in a crummy Ohio college. Faculty wives are among the volunteers. Neither Robert Kyle nor Patrick Catling is a hopelessly bad writer, sentence by sentence, although Catling wins the nomination for the silliest line of the year (so far): “ Camilla’s cheeks prettily pinkened. “ # The Deal, by G. William Marshall (511 pages; Bartholomew House; $6.95) is notable, by contrast, for its more traditional approach. No new-fangled gadgets here; just the plain, old-fashioned dildo. That is understandable, since the plot is a plain, old-fashioned story about the raunchy movie world. The hero is “ the Baron, “ Hollywood’s No. 1 superstar. He has a “ tremendous problem. “ He is forever being “ laughed out of bedrooms, “ so he asks the boys over an makeup to fashion a substitute artifact for him. He kills a girl with it. # Perhaps the most interesting fact about this limpid novel is”

Author:

Source: Time Magazine: 1968/02/23

Year: 1968

Quote: “Men may think they have more freedom and more choices, he says, but the options open to them are not meaningfully different. In this state, man rejects all thoughts that challenge society’s rationale-hence Marcuse’s definition of man as “ one-dimensional. “ # “ The goods and services that the individuals buy, “ he writes, “ control their needs and petrify their faculties. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable gadgetsthat keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue-which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions. “”

Author:

Source: Time Magazine: 1968/03/22

Year: 1969

Quote: “During this time of patriotic feelings, the liberals insure the promise of pay-off from the chosen side, and they begin to send our sons, husbands, and other love ones to assist as a return on that job opportunity. / We look around at the gadgets we own for the first time, even if they’re not paid for, with a ‘they’re mine’ attitude, and we decide that there is no better place than America, and kiss the men good-by for God and HIS Country. / Six months later, our neighbor, our kin folk, and soon we find that our men will not return, a telegram comes telling they’re dead.”

Author: Matthews, Sondra

Source: Milwaukee Star, published as The Greater Milwaukee Star (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) • 11-22-1969 • Page Page 5

Year: 1969

Quote: “In addition, Consumer Reports brings you a wide range of authoritative—sometimes startling—articles. You regularly receive candid, down-to-earth discussions of deceptive packaging practices (with examples cited by name), advertising claims, credit buying and the actual cost of credit . . . honest reports on vitamins and other drugs . . . revealing facts about new, highly promoted gadgets that are often a waste of money.”

Author:

Source: Milwaukee Star (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) • 12-06-1969 • Page 3

Year: 1971

Quote: “This brings me to the crux of my argument. Throughout the phase of history which we have come to survey, till very recently, to be a scientist was a calling, not a job. Scientists were men of science, not just men in science. They had come to science driven by an inner urge, curiosity, a quest for knowledge, and they knew, or learned, what it was all about. They were not drawn or lured into science in masses by fascinating gadgets, public acclaim, manpower needs of industries and governments, or job security; nor did they just drift in for no good reason. The scene, however, is now changing rapidly. The popularity and needs of an expanding science bring in more drifters and followers than pioneers. […] What were their guides; Ideas, not gadgets, not the need to publish. Ideas, in turn, sprout from the fertile soil of experience.”

Author: Weiss, Paul A.

Source: Hafner Publishing Company. 1971.

Year: 1980

Quote: “Customers seem to be perpetually happy with the wastefulness of their economic management. For despite their old car’s serviceability, the owner will trade it in for a new gadget or style change. I have always believed that part of Belle Sherwin’s reasons for wanting me in the Foundation, made in the years after the end of the war, was my professional capacity in the teaching of government.”

Author: Motley, Francis

Source: New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Year: 1983

Quote: “GIMMICKS HAVE seen mink headcovers, bamboo shafts, concave sand wedges, the twelve-wood, the seven-and-a-half-iron, floating balls, linoleum shoes, dome-shaped tees, distance measurers, girdles that keep your elbows together, an iron that can be converted into everything from a two-iron to a niblick, gadgets that steady your head, and putters as ugly as Stillson wrenches. But the silliest thing I have ever seen in golf is the headcover that goes with the ball retriever. One I saw was made of glove leather, like an Italian shoe, and. was used to protect a retriever made of anodized aluminum, a material that wouldn’t rust if you left it for twenty years in the Great Salt Lake.”

Author: Price, Charles

Source: Atheneum, New York

Year: 1988

Quote: “” Of course you are. You know your self-hatred manifests itself in your drive to succeed in your career. And the more successful you are, the more you loathe yourself. And then you gorge – secretly, in your chic, narrow esophagus of an alley kitchen with all those stainless steel gadgets. “ Such things you gorge on, dear Monica, so tacky. Fish and chips, ice cream by the half gallon – and not even ice cream from some SoHo specialty shop, but common supermarket lard. You make quite a pig of yourself, Monica, in that high-rent apartment of yours. And then you come to me. For absolution. “”

Author: Douglas, Carole Nelson

Source: New York: Tom Doherty Associates