Gadget

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A gadget is a mechanical device or any ingenious article.^[2] Gadgets are sometimes referred to tướng as gizmos.

History

The etymology of the word is disputed. The word first appears as reference to tướng an 18th-century tool in glassmaking that was developed as a spring pontil.^[3] As stated in the glass dictionary published by the Corning Museum of Glass, a gadget is a "metal rod with a spring clip that grips the foot of a vessel and so sánh avoids the use of a pontil". Gadgets were first used in the late 18th century.^[4] According to tướng 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 trang chính in a Trung Quốc tea-clipper containing the earliest known usage in print.^[5]

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.^[5] Other sources cite a derivation from the French gâchette which has been applied to tướng various pieces of a firing mechanism, or the French gagée, a small tool or accessory.^[5]

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 tướng the collection of fitments to tướng be seen on motor cycles. 'His handle-bars are smothered in gadgets' refers to tướng such things as speedometers, mirrors, levers, badges, mascots, &c., attached to tướng 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 tướng the 'gauge' used to tướng test the accuracy of their work. In fact, to tướng borrow from present-day Army slang, 'gadget' is applied to tướng 'any old thing.'^[6]

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 Thủ đô 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."^[7]

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:

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A characteristic class of US products––perhaps the most characteristic––is a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to tướng its size and cost, whose function is to tướng transform some undifferentiated phối of circumstances to tướng 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 tướng its prospective user. A class of servants to tướng human needs, these clip-on devices, these portable gadgets, have coloured American thought and action far more deeply––I suspect––than is commonly understood.^[1]

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 tướng computer programs that provide services without needing an independent application to tướng be launched for each one, but instead run rẩy in an environment that manages multiple gadgets. There are several implementations based on existing software development techniques, lượt thích JavaScript, size input, and various image formats. Proprietary formats include Google Desktop, Google Gadgets, Microsoft Gadgets, the AmigaOS Workbench and dashboard software Apple Widgets.

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 điện thoại tư vấn GUI widget—a control element in graphical user interface. This naming convention remains in continuing use (as of 2008) since then.

The X11^[8] windows system 'Intrinsics'^[9] also defines gadgets and their relationship to tướng widgets (buttons, labels etc.). The gadget was a windowless widget which was supposed to tướng 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 tướng the generic meaning. The word widget is older in this context. In the movie "Back to tướng School" from 1986 by Alan Metter, there is a scene where an economics professor Dr. Barbay, wants to tướng start for educational purposes a fictional company that produces "widgets: It's a fictional product."