The gadget has origins in the wiki, the origin "gadget" will mengeok back around the 19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is anecdotal evidence for the use of "gadget" as a substitute name for a technical item whose precise name one can not remember since the 1850s, with Robert Brown's 1886 book Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy from out trip logs and home China tea clipper containing the earliest known usage in print.
The etymology of the word is debated. A widely circulated story states 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 company, but this is contrary to the evidence that the word it has been used before in nautical circles, and the fact that it does not become popular, at least in the United States, until after World War I. Other sources cite a derivation from the French gâchette been applied to various pieces of firing mechanism, or the French gagée, a small tool or accessory.
The October 1918 issue of Notes and Queries contains a multi-article entry on "gadgets" word (12 S. iv. 187). H. Tapley-Soper of the City Library, Exeter, writes:
A discussion appears 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 the inclusion on the basis that it is commonly used throughout the country, and a naval officer who was present said that for many years been a popular expression in the service for a tool or implement, the exact name is unknown or has for the moment been forgotten. I also often hear applied by motor-cycle friends to the collection equipment to be seen on a motorcycle. 'His handle-bars are smothered in gadgets' refers to such things as speedometers, mirrors, levers, badges, mascots, & c, attached to the wheel. Handle. The 'jigger' or short-rest used in billiards is also often called a 'gadget', and the name has been applied by local platelayers to 'gauge' used to test the accuracy of their work. In fact, to borrow from present-day Army slang, 'gadget' is applied [3] 'old thing. '
The use of the term in military parlance goes beyond the navy. In the book "Above the Battle" by Vivian Drake, published in 1918 by D. Appleton & Co., 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 good, some comic and some extraordinary "
In the second half of the twentieth century, "gadget" has taken on the connotation of the term compactness and mobility. In the 1965 essay "The Great Gizmo" (a term used interchangeably with "gadget" throughout the essay), critic Reyner Banham architecture and design defines the item as:
A characteristic class of U.S. products - perhaps the most characteristic - is a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to the size and cost, whose function is to transform some undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human desires. Minimum skills required in installation and use, and it is independent of any physical or social infrastructure beyond that by which can be ordered from catalog and delivered to its prospective user. A class of servants to human needs, these clip-on devices, these portable gadgets, have colored American thought and action far more deeply. So first posts that mention gadgets sourced from wiki, I hope to make you aware of the gadgets.
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