A gadget is a small tool such as a machine that has a particular function, but is often thought of as a novelty. Gadgets are sometimes referred to as gizmos.
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 avoids the use of a pontil.
A widely circulated story holds that the word gadget was “invented” when Gaget, Gauthier & Cie, the company behind the repouss construction of the Statue of Liberty , 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.
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. ‘His handle-bars are smothered in gadgets’ refers to such things as speedometers, mirrors, levers, badges, mascots, &c., attached to 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 the ‘gauge’ used to test the accuracy of their work.
By the second half of the twentieth century, the term “gadget” had taken on the connotations of compactness and mobility.
A characteristic class of US productsperhaps the most characteristicis a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to its size and cost, whose function is to transform some undifferentiated set of circumstances to 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 its prospective user.
