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 etc).

(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 twenty-first 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.

Gaffer & Duct

Gaffer (pronounced gaf-er)

(1) The chief electrician on the set of a movie or television show.

(2) In informal use, a boss, supervisor, or manager.

(3) In informal use, an old man, especially one living in the country (often used affectionately or patronizingly).

(4) A foreman or overseer in charge of a group of physical laborers; the coach or manager of a sports team.

(5) In glassmaking, a master glassblower responsible for shaping glassware.

(6) Slang for boy or youth (unique to Ireland); used in maritime regions to refer to the baby of the house.

(7) A type of tape used usually as a safety device to tape-down cables to reduce the risk of tripping hazards (technically gaffer’s tape).

(8) A boat's crew member whose duty is to gaff (a tool consisting of a large metal hook with a handle or pole, especially the one used to pull large fish aboard a boat) a (large) fish once the angler has reeled it in.

(9) In slang, as “to gaff”, “gaffered” or ”to gaffer”, a description of some temporary or roughly improvised repair using gaffer tape or some other quick and dirty method; “to make a gaff” as a description of a mistake is a variation of this.

1565–1575: Thought likely to be a contraction of godfather, but with the vowels influenced by grandfather.  The use to describe “an elderly rustic" was apparently based on continental analogies (compare gammer and the related French compère and German Gevatter).  It seems originally to have been a term of respect, also applied familiarly; from "old man" and was by 1841 extended to foremen and supervisors generally.  In UK police forces, it’s common slang to describe the officer in charge of a particular section or squad and in Association Football (soccer), the head coach or manager.  In the early twentieth century, it was carried over to the electrician or technician in charge of lighting on a film set because the natural lighting on early film sets was adjusted by opening and closing flaps in the tent, these cloths called gaff cloths or gaff flaps.  Because the technician used a long pole with a hook known as a “gaff hook”, he came to be known as a “the gaff hooker” and, as English does when users find there are too many syllables, this was truncated to “the gaffer”.  The tape later used for electrical cables was almost exclusively in the gaffers' toolboxes and thus became “gaffer’s tape”.  Now it’s known almost always as “gaffer tape”.  Gaffer is a noun; the noun plural is gaffers.

Ad-hoc wrap: 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais two door coupe, "duct tape" version.

Duct (pronounced duhkt)

(1) Any tube, canal, pipe, or conduit by which a fluid, air, or other substance is conducted or conveyed.

(2) In anatomy and zoology, a tube, canal, or vessel conveying a body fluid, especially a glandular secretion or excretion.

(3) In botany, a cavity or vessel formed by elongated cells or by many cells.

(4) In the infrastructure of electricity, a single enclosed runway for conductors or cables.

(5) In a printing press, the reservoir for ink.

(6) Guidance; direction; quotation (obsolete).

1640-1650: From the Latin ductus (conveyance of water; a leading, a conduit pipe), noun use of the past participle of ducere (to lead) from dūcō (I lead, draw), from the primitive Indo-European root deuk (to lead).  Use has endured in the Medieval Latin aqueduct and the high rank of aristocracy, duke, drawn from the past participle of ducere (to lead); the construct was duc (variant stem of dūcere (to lead)) + tus (suffix of verbal action).  The meaning in an anatomical sense (vessel of an animal body by which blood, lymph etc, are conveyed) was first noted in the 1660s while that of a "conduit or channel" dates from 1713.  Use in a variety of architectural and engineering contexts to describe "tubes in a structure" developed after the use to describe an "air tube" in 1884.  Duct & ducting are nouns & verbs, ducted is a verb & adjective and ductal is an adjective; the noun plural is ducts.

Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, New Mexico, July, 1945.

Canadian physicist Louis Slotin (1910–1946, left) and US electronics technician Herb Lerh (1922-2018, right) with the partially assembled “Gadget”.  The small, strapped-down cylinder at the bottom-right is the tamper plug cylinder that would be inserted into the bomb’s housing.  Slotin died in an accident involving the “Demon Core” which picked up its dark nickname because, in an earlier accident, it had also claimed the life of US physicist Haroutune Krikor “Harry” Daghlian (1921-1945).

Gadget was the first nuclear device, detonated in the Trinity test in New Mexico on 16 July, 1945, some three weeks before the A-bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.On learning nuclear fission had been mastered, Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) observed: “fire was the first discovery, this is the second.”  Despite that feeling, after this photograph was de-classified and published, what much amused some was that even with state-of-the-art nuclear physics, duct tape was apparently still essential.  Like the third bomb (dropped on Nagasaki) the Gadget was a “plutonium implosion fission” bomb whereas the one used against Hiroshima attack was “uranium gun-type fission” design.  By the standards of nuclear physics, the “gun-type” design was relatively simple and so confident were the scientists it was thought not necessary to conduct a test prior to operational use.  However, the design could be used only with a uranium core and, at the time, it was difficult and time-consuming to produce in the required volume uranium of the correct type.  By contrast, weapons-grade plutonium could more quickly be produced but the method to trigger the detonation was wholly a new theory, thus the need for the Trinity test.  The Hiroshima bomb was a genuine one-off, all subsequent nuclear weapons using a plutonium core (although some have speculated one or more of the tests conducted by the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea) may have had uranium cores.

Duct and Gaffer Tape

Duct tape scene: Lindsay Lohan as Tess Conway in Freaky Friday (2003).

Duct tape was in 1894 originally sold under the name duck tape, long, non-adhesive strips of plain cotton duck cloth used in various mechanical processes.  The name was transferred to a plastic-coated adhesive tape used by U.S. soldiers in World War II, probably because of its waterproof qualities (ie the sense of "water off a duck's back").  It continued in civilian use after the war, and the name shifted to duct tape by 1958, perhaps because the most common use was in air ducts, which also accounts for its still standard silver-gray color. Often casually regarded as interchangeable, duct and gaffer tapes are constructed differently because they’re intended for different purposes.  Indeed, using one for the intended application of the other can cause messy or worse results.  They’re similar in that both are hand-tearable, conform well to uneven surfaces and tend to be sold in the same packaging and sizes.  Duct tape is constructed with a polyethylene (PE) cloth backing, a material that makes it waterproof and contains an aggressive, rubber-based glue, allowing it easily to adhere to many of surfaces.   Duct tape has (1) a shiny, reflective backing, (2) is for semi-permanent or permanent applications and (3) tends to leave an adhesive residue when removed.  A specialized variation is a heat-resistant foil (not cloth) duct tape, useful for sealing heating and cooling ducts.  For decades silvery gray, it’s now available in colors and even printed designs.

Duct tape fashion: Lindsay Lohan in duct tape cocktail dress.  Tape is 3M Utility Duct Tape 2929 (Silver) and the shoes are Jimmy Choo Patent Leather Sandals.

Gaffer tape is made with a coated cloth backing and a synthetic, rubber-based glue.  Because it doesn’t have the PE backing, gaffer tape is not waterproof but the barrier properties in the backing make it moisture resistant in most cases.  This means it shouldn’t be used for waterproofing but is suitable for temporary use in high-humidity and moist environments. The adhesive on gaffer tape is less aggressive than duct tape, rendering it more easily removed when temporary need is over.  Because of its origins in the theatre, gaffer tape traditionally had a matte white or black backing to reduce the reflection of light but is now available in colored gloss finishes.  It's important gaffer tape be (relatively) easy to remove because in most cases its use intrinsically is temporary, typically to render cables run here and there safe, ensuring they['re not a trip hazard.  Unfortunately, because the adhesive used needs still to be strong enough to stick to surfaces as long as is required, a residue can be left on some surfaces, notably carpets and this is more apparent on some colors.  Many techs have been shouted at by those upset at what's been done to their carpets.

Piet Mondrian’s 1941 New York City 1 as it (presumably correctly) sat in the artist's studio in 1944 (left) and as it has since 1945 been exhibited (upside-down) in New York and Düsseldorf (right).  Spot the difference. 

The term “duct tape fashion” seems to have become a generic, possibly because of the dark association of the stuff with kidnappings and abductions but many of the products so described actually use different types of tape, such as the New York City series of abstract works created in the 1940s with multi-colored paper tape by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s (1872-1944).  The critics responded well to the works although one version, first exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1945, has since 1980 hung upside down in the Düsseldorf Museum as part of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s collection.  The revelation critics and curators for 80 years discussed and interpreted Mondrian’s meaning despite it being upside down was greeted with glee by those sceptical of modern art but the piece was unsigned, sometimes an indication the artist deemed it unfinished but he left no notes.

On the catwalk: The Black Tape Project at Miami Swim Week, July 2023.

Predictably, the “duct tape bikini” was, in terms of publicity generated, the highlight of Miami Swim Week in July 2023 but for some it was a surprise to see the return of the (trademarked) Black Tape Project because in New York, not six months earlier, Joel Alvarez (creator of the project), announced the brand had staged its “final show”.  Stories duly were written but at Swim Week it transpired the “brand” being discontinued was “Joel Alvarez” and that having “…buried Joel Alvarez on that stage in front of the world”, henceforth he’d be known as “Drakhan Blackhart” and nobody denied that was a wonderful name.  On Instagram (@thekingoftape), Mr Blackhart informed the world he was the “…creator of the Black Tape Project™.  I am the world's only body tape expert, founder and pioneer of the Body Tape Art Genre.  Because of my concepts, I've been able to travel to over 42 countries and counting.”

Nice work if you can get it: An artist dedicated to his craft, Mr Blackhart “hand-applies” the black tape and studs.

Less became more during Mr Blackhart’s half-year hiatus from tape shows because what showed up on the Miami catwalk was even skimpier than what had been seen before; always minimalist, the results were now tending to the minuscule so as well as creating much interest, production costs were lowered because less tape was now required.  Of course, reducing the volume of tape brings artistic challenges because there’s less scope to introduce differences in the designs but it’s not for no reason the imaginative Mr Blackhart describes himself as the “King of Tape”: While conceptually all the installations (that does seem the right word) on the models were by definition “variations on a theme of black tape”, there was enough variety in the placement to keep the audience’s attention.  What the approach does mean is that the point must soon be reached where the possibilities have been exhausted so it may not be long before Black Tape Project models appear adorned with tapes of different colors and that could create a whole new language although there seems not reason why colors can't appear under the "Black Tape" brand.

The language of catwalk tape: From the Black Tape Project (left) and Miami Art Body Tape (right), Miami Swim Week, 2023.

The “duct tape fashion” business is also becoming crowded, Miami Art Body Tape presenting its debut show at a Miami Swim Week event in June.  While he discussed the aesthetic, brand founder Andrei Stamate also revealed interesting technical aspects about the use of the technique, explaining the tape is more difficult to apply than it is to remove and the peeling off “…doesn’t hurt as much as you’d think”; it’s assumed he was speaking from the models’ point of view.  The “body tape” used is of course different in construction and adhesive quality from industrial types such as gaffer or duct-tape but nor was it quite the same as medical grade tape or the famous “Hollywood tape”, the latter better known by the colloquial term “tit tape”.  Body tape “…sticks very well but if the models sweat it could come off” Mr Stamate revealed and has a better grip than the metallic types which he described as “sensitive”.

Trinitite

Trinitite (pronounced trin-a-tight)

(1) The glassy residue left on the desert floor after the Trinity nuclear bomb test of 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA.

(2) By extension, any melt glasses left by nuclear bombs (known also as Alamogordo, atomsite glass or nuclear melt glass).

1945: Compound word trinit(y) +‎ -ite.  Trinity is from the Middle English trinitie & trinite from the Anglo-Norman trinitie or trinite (or ternite, trenite, trinetei, trinitiet & trinitet) from the Latin trīnitātem, accusative singular of trīnitās (the number three; a triad; the Trinity), from trīni (from trīnus (triple) from trēs, from the Proto-Italic trēs, from the primitive Indo-European tréyes (three)) + the suffix -itās from the Proto-Italic -itāts & -otāts from the primitive Indo-European –tehts, the suffix forming nouns indicating a state of being.  The suffix –ite is from the Ancient Greek -ίτης (-ítēs) and was adopted in Latin as part of Greek loanwords, both as –ītēs but also often as -īta.  It was used in Biblical tribal names (Thus either Levītēs or Levīta; plural in –ītae) and in the Medieval Latin of religious groups, such as Marcionītae, Ebiōnītae, Monophysītae.  It’s an adjective-forming suffix, especially of nominalised adjectives identifying groups of people as "those belonging to".  Trinitite is a noun; the noun plural is trinitites.  The verb trinitize is unrelated; it's from Christian theology and means "to divide into a trinity".

It was the physicist Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), head of the Manhattan Project which developed the first atomic weapons, who choose the name of the test site for the first atom bomb: Trinity.  He’s remembered for a snatch of verse he said the sight of the first atomic explosion made him recall, words from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.  Oppenheimer also had a fondness for the metaphysical poetry of John Donne (1572–1631), the Church of England cleric, and said he remembered also:

As West and East
In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one
So death doth touch the Resurrection

While those lines do not a Trinity make, others do such as Batter my heart, three person’d God and the Holy Trinity permeates much of his Donne's work.

Variations since Trinity include kharitonchik (melt glasses from the Soviet nuclear bomb Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan), impactite (metamorphic minerals caused by meteor heating of non-meteoritic materials), impact glass (melt glasses caused by meteor heating of non-meteoritic materials), fulgurite (melt glasses caused by lightning strikes) and fusion crust (metamorphic minerals on the surface of meteorites caused by atmospheric entry heating).  Trinitite has also been referred to as atomsite or Alamogordo glass (after the nearby city).

Physicist Norris Bradbury (1909–1997; director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory 1945-1970), group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled "Gadget" (code-name for the first plutonium A-bomb) atop the test tower, New Mexico, 16 July 1945).

The Trinity test of the plutonium A-bomb in New Mexico in July 1945 was a genuine test.  The uranium A-bomb which had also been built and which ultimately was dropped on Hiroshima in August was a device in which the scientists had such faith that it was deemed no test was necessary, something that sounds astonishing now but among all the physicists and engineers attached to the Manhattan Project (the A-bomb development team), there were no dissenting voices.  As a uranium bomb, the Hiroshima device was (at least for decades) a genuine one-off, all subsequent nuclear weapons being plutonium-based devices (and that may still be true; the details of the DPRK’s (North Korea) bombs remaining murky).  A uranium bomb turned out to be (relatively) easy to design and build and the trigger mechanism was simple but production of uranium to the specification required was a slow and exacting process given the machinery at the time available.  By contrast, a supply of weapons-grade plutonium was possible with the existing facilities but it was a formidable engineering challenge to create the trigger mechanism while ensuring the device remained within the size and weight parameters of a gravity bomb dropped from an aircraft which would have to fly thousands of miles to reach the target.  The Hiroshima bomb could be made to explode simply by firing a uranium bullet into the uranium core but if that approach was used with plutonium, all that would happen would be the melting of the core.  The solution was to surround the core with sufficient high-explosive to create the pressure required to trigger the chain reaction.  It was this process that the Trinity was staged to test.

Trinitite on the desert floor.

Although the test was over seventy-five years ago and completely fulfilled the purpose of testing the plutonium bomb, it was in another sense an extraordinary experiment in high-energy physics and even in the twenty-first century, analysis of the data and the physical aftermath at the site continues to reveal interesting discoveries.  Geological excavations in 2005 confirmed that the explosion, as predicted, initially pushed-down the ground but that it then rebounded, forcing the material upwards into the fireball in the sky where it was vaporized before cooling and crystallizing, eventually raining down in the form of the trinitite fragments.  Most of the trinitite was green because of the iron content in the sand while a smaller volume was black because their source was the iron from which Trinity’s tower structure was constructed and, being refined and processed, the iron content was much greater than that in the sand.  Finally, among all the trinitite, there was found a tiny number of red crystals which gained their color from all the copper cables which were also vaporized.  The propensity of copper to color its immediate environment was well-known, the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto formed in 1873 with a company name from the Rio Tinto (red river or Tinto River); the highly acidic river in the Sierra Morena mountains of southwestern Spain that runs red & orange because of the high copper content in the surrounding soil.

Red Trinitite.

Beginning in that fraction of a second when the nuclear age was born was the process which produced the red crystals, the extreme pressure and temperature (the Trinity site was briefly hotter than the surface of the Sun) forging a most unusual structure within one grain of the material just 10 micrometers across (barely longer than a red blood cell).  Made from silicon, copper, calcium and iron, the rare form of matter was called a quasicrystal.  Normally, crystals are made from atoms locked in a lattice that repeats in a regular pattern but quasicrystals, while having a structure that is orderly like a normal crystal, don’t have patterns which repeat and this grants quasicrystals properties forbidden to normal crystals.  First discovered in laboratory observations during the 1980s, quasicrystals also occur naturally in meteorites, matter transformed by stars, another place of extreme heat and pressure.

The Trinity test, the world's first nuclear explosion.

Until their observation in the 1980s, physicists regarded quasicrystals as “impossible” because they would have violated the rules scientists had over centuries constructed to define crystalline materials; the quasicrystal was thus a ‘black swan” moment in physics.  Traditionally, crystals were held to possess what were known as “rotational symmetries”, places where the structure could symmetrically be split in half, along one, two, three, four and six axes.  The black swan quasicrystal broke the rules or, more precisely, proved the rules were wrong, demonstrating instead an “icosahedral symmetry” a construct which includes six independent five-fold symmetry axes; as solids with these rotational symmetries, the quasicrystal is unique.  To the US military-industrial complex, it may also prove uniquely useful because, if a sample could be obtained of a quasicrystal created during nuclear tests conducted by other nations, it could be analyzed and might yield new understandings of their programs and weapons.  It’s always been possible to examine radioactive debris and gases to build models of how the devices were built and the materials used but those signatures decay.  Not only might a quasicrystal reveal new information but, and this is obviously most useful if the analytical process uses non-destructive tests, quasicrystals are a form of matter which goes as close (theoretically) to lasting forever as any yet known.

Lindsay Lohan (right) illustrating the typical hue of green trinitite (left).

What’s sometimes described as “trinitite green” and used for glass crockery or decorative items is misleading because such purity was never in New Mexico after the blast.  A glassy material, most trinitite exists in a range between a pale to olive green but smaller quantities in red and black have also been observed, the coloration dependent on the specific minerals and materials in the blast site.  The green is a product of iron while the red comes from the copper electrical wiring used in the Trinity test equipment being fused together with the quartz and feldspar sand grains from the desert floor.  A quirk is that red trinitite is brightly fluorescent under short wave ultra-violet light whereas the more abundant green variety of typically shows little to no fluorescence under UV, the difference again due to the mineral composition.  Black trinitite is rarest, formed by virtue of the presence of iron alone from the tower with no copper content.