Gadget

Gadget (pronounced gaj-it)

(1) A mechanical contrivance or device; any ingenious article (by convention, something small).

(2) Any contraption which is thought interesting because of its ingenuity or novelty rather than for its practical use.

(3) A name for something used in circumstances when the correct name cannot be recalled (obsolete and supplanted in this context by thingamajig, gizmo, doohickey, whatchamacallit et al).

(4) In slang, any consumer electronics product.

(5) In computing, a sequence of machine code instructions crafted as part of an exploit that attempts to divert execution to a memory location chosen by the attacker.

(6) In computer science, a technique for converting a part of one problem to an equivalent part of another problem (used in constructing reductions).

1850–1855: Of uncertain origin but it may be linked with gagée or gâchette (catch of a lock, sear of a gunlock; trigger) a diminutive of gâche (staple of a lock)).  The alternative etymology is that it’s derived from the French family name Gaget because of the connection with the metalwork foundry Gaget, Gauthier & Co, which produced promotional “gadgets” in collaboration with the project to build the Statue of Liberty.  The word first appeared in print in 1886.  In sailor’s slang, the noun gadjet was in use by at least 1886 in the sense of “any small mechanical thing or part of a ship for which they lacked (or forgot the correct name for).  Because of the possible connection between gadget and gâchette (a diminutive of gâche), with seafaring being a multi-national trade, many twentieth century dictionaries speculated a link with “gauge” but the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has ruled this “improbable”.  The noun widget (a small manufactured item, produced usually in great quantity) was and invention of US English and probably an alteration of gadget.  It was coined by playwright George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) and it first appeared in his play Beggar on Horseback (1924).  In the years since, widget has been adopted by economists and others as a placeholder name for an unnamed, unspecified, or hypothetical manufactured good or product, usually for purposes of measuring or explaining productivity, unit production costs etc.  Gizmo was World War II (1939-1945) era US Marine and Navy slang for “any small device or piece of equipment the correct name of which eluded one”.  Its origin is utterly mysterious but in was in regular use by at least 1942.  Gadget & gadgetry are nouns and gadgety is an adjective; the noun plural is gadgets.

Lindsay Lohan texting friendly greetings on a smartphone.  The smartphone was the most influential gadget of the early twentieth century but within three years of its debut had become so integrated into social and economic life that it had ceased to be regarded as a “gadget” although an industry sprung up to provide accessories, some of which legitimately were gadgets (multi-function stands & cases; gaming controllers etc).

Windows Gadgets in Sidebar.

At the hardware level, there have over the decades been literally thousands of gadgets which attach to, hang off or in some way interact with PCs, laptops and servers.  Some proved so useful they came to be thought indispensable and were integrated into the core devices, some were niche products for controlling things as diverse as telescopes or fish tanks and some were so absurdly useless (a USB ghost detector; a mouse with an integrated telephone) one wonders what market research was undertaken.  Almost forgotten now however is that for a while, Microsoft had a entire “Gadgets Division” dedicated to developing or perfecting lightweight, single-purpose applications which ran directly on a user’s desktop or a “bolt-on” called a sidebar (although some actually ran from a web page).  For those whose memories stretch back to the earliest attempts to provide some degree of multi-tasking functionality on the inherently single-tasking PC/MS-DOS operating system, the sight of the gadgets summoned a warm nostalgic feeling for TSR (Terminate & Stay Resident) products like Borland’s Sidekick, a personal information manager (PIM) with a variety of features, the most popular of which was said to be the calculator.  The Microsoft Gadgets were introduced when certain builds of Windows 7 were released and the implementation was extended under Windows Vista but because of the way the Gadgets interacted with HTML, it proved impossible adequately to secure them against vulnerabilities and they were withdrawn during the Windows 8 Product cycle.

The gadget in the test stand in New Mexico (left), gadget 0.016 of a second after the nuclear chain reaction was triggered (centre) and the mushroom cloud, 15 seconds after detonation (right).  The photographs were taken a a distance of approximately 10 miles (16 km).

In the military, project code-names can occasionally be amusing (although many are in-jokes) but where secrecy matters (notably during war-time), the protocol usually is to choose a name which gives no hint of the nature of the purpose.  That was the origin of the “Manhattan Project” which covered the activities involved in the creation of the first nuclear weapons.  Since late in the nineteenth century the US Army Corps had been organized on a geographic basis, divided into the districts in which work was undertaken and it was a flexible system, the borders altered as needs changed.  In August 1942, the “Manhattan Engineer District” was created, something which would have appeared to any outsiders as something as merely procedural as the establishment of any of the districts which had for time to time been gazetted.  However, the secret of the Manhattan Engineer District was that it had no geographical boundaries and its function was to build the atomic bomb (A-Bomb).  Originally, the plan had been to use the code name “Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials”, very much in the vein of “Tube Alloys” which had been name the British used for their nuclear research programme but it was thought Manhattan Engineer District was much less likely to attract attention.  The rationale for the code name for the actual A-Bomb was much the same; it came to be known as “The Gadget”, something vague and nondescript.  The gadget was first tested (code-named “Trinity”) on 16 July 1945, in the New Mexico desert.