Breaking out of the drawers and toy boxes, this new, networked digital gadget-our tablets, netbooks, phones, music players, media players, e-readers, cameras, and portable gaming devices-became personal, mobile, and ubiquitous. Embracing its electronic potential it established a foothold in personal entertainment and communication, where with the convergence of mass media and computer processing at the end of the twentieth century it completed its passage from a functionally specialized, handy gimmick to become one of the most important categories of technical object and a major force in global consumer electronics. Their incorporation of electronics brought greater popularity, and toy boxes soon filled with beeping gizmos while plastic objects with blinking LEDs spilled out of drawers.įor all its success, this proliferation of the gadget proved to be only the preliminary phase of the gadget’s rise. Again, perhaps, this suited the gadget associated with the domestic sphere and sold in novelty shops, department stores, and catalogs, gadgets quietly succeeded in colonizing everyday life, taking up residence in our kitchen cupboards and drawers and our sheds and garages. By the early twentieth century it had changed from the frustrated expression of aphasia at an object’s recalcitrance to a category of objects in itself, and by the postwar period it had become a profitable element of technical and consumer culture, albeit one often overlooked and rarely taken seriously. Unlike “chicken-fixing,” “timmey-noggy,” or “wim-wom,” however, the “gadjet” was destined for greater things. The Oxford English Dictionary claims anecdotal evidence for the term’s use by the 1850s as a word for an object whose name one cannot remember, a use consistent with its first print appearance in Robert Brown’s 1886 book Spunyarn and Spindrift, a Sailor Boy’s Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-Clipper, which reports: “Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom-just pro-tem., you know” (quoted in Quinion 2007). The story that it was derived from Gaget, Gauthier and Cie’s name stamp on tourist copies of the Statue of Liberty, is now discredited, and sources suggest instead an etymological origin in the French gâchette, the “catch-piece of a mechanism” (a term applied, for example, to parts of a firing mechanism), or gagée, meaning a small tool or instrument. ![]() ![]() Appropriately for an object whose boundaries and definition are vague and whose forms and functions are varied, even the origins of the word are unclear. The gadget is the emblem of post-industrial society.įrom the beginning the gadget has been surrounded by an air of uncertainty, a slipperiness in our understanding that has benefited it in its slow rise to prominence. ![]() The machine was the emblem of industrial society.
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