History of technologchy

The etymology of the word is disputed.

The word first appears as reference to 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 avoids the use of a pontil”. Gadgets were first used in the late 18th century.^[4] According to 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 home in a China 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 US, until after World War I.^[5] Other sources cite a derivation from the French gâchette which has been applied to 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: