Gadget, 1880-2010

The Google Ngram Viewer basically confirms what I’ve been seeing with the Corpus of Historical American English on the usage of “gadget” from 1880 to 2010.  The postwar spike, so far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the code name for the first atom bomb test, since the name wasn’t declassified until some time later.  Instead, the 1950s was the era of “armchair-and-push-button utopias.”  The overall arc you’re looking at shows the movement of gadgetry from labor saving tool to portable electronic device.

Playing with Ngrams

Today Google opened up the Ngram Viewer, a word search visualizer that queries the full text of 5.2 million books published from 1500 to 2008.  Ever wonder what has been trending over the last 500 years?

• The more disperse, abstract “space” has been slowly gaining on the concreteness of “place” in a long arc from 1860 to the present. http://bit.ly/e5UKOX
• The Enlightenment knew how to get things done until 1865, when for the first time since the 17th century, more things were “broken” than “fixed.” http://bit.ly/fd61R9
• The “gadget” has a far wider cultural significance than the “gizmo” or the “widget,” until the latter term starts getting taken up by software communities in the late 1980s.  http://bit.ly/i11B7U
• Mars has always been the most popular planet, with spikes around the canal controversy of the 1910s, and the Mariner orbiter images in the 1970s.  I wonder why the spike in Venus around 1900?  http://bit.ly/fq4Ie8
• In 1880, 1 out of every 100,000 words was “vagina.”  That is a lot.  It’s far more than most of the words surveyed here, and “penis” has never been that popular.  http://bit.ly/e6OREG
• Changing forms of staying connected off the grid, with “wireless,” “portable,” and “mobile.” Interesting to see how “wireless,” once the generic name for broadcasting telegraphic signals over the airwaves–i.e. wireless telegraphy–is resurrected with mobile media. http://bit.ly/hzvTNk
• The evolution of media.  Out of the big three mass media (radio, film, television), radio is the only one that shows a clear decline.  We have to get a bit more fine-grained to look at the subgenres, storage formats, and communications networks such as photograph, phonograph, telegraph, magazine, wireless, and internet.

More on Google Ngrams and the Culturomics team behind the project in the Scientific American and New York Times.

And for some more unbelievably smart Ngrams, check out:

• Robin Sloan
• Alexis Madrigal
• @zunguzungu
• Tim Maly
• Discover’s huge set of experiments
• The Atlantic’s roundup of a single day’s worth of distant reading around the Internet.

The Fable of the Ideal Gadget

The definition of “gadget” was wide open in the 1920s and 30s.  Though the word was still used by and large as a kind of empty container for “any old thing,” the things it contained ranged anywhere from jewelry to figures of speech.

One particular application of “gadget” taps into the narrative dimensions of the word’s ability to fit any old situation: the fable.  ”The Fable of the Ideal Gadget” circulated in both British and American contexts between the wars.  In On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (1922), Robert Graves uses the fable as a demonstration of how each poem is begun with the expectation of absolute perfection, but after being edited countless times, “the inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at liberty to try again.”

The socialist agitator and columnist for the Daily Worker, Michael Gold, deploys the same fable in a 1936 editorial toward a very different end.  In his “Fable of the Ideal Gadget,” collected in Change the World! (1936), the gadget symbolizes the “ideally perfect, readily noble, spiritually supreme workers” many of his comrades were searching desperately for.  It begins, as so many fables do,

A man once went into an ironmonger’s shop and said hesitantly: ‘Do you sell those gadgets for fixing on doors?’

‘Well, sir,’ replied the assistant, ‘I am not quite sure if I understand your requirements, but I take it you are needing a patent automatic door-closer?’

‘Exactly,’ said the customer.  ’One to fix on my pantry door which, by the way, contains a glass window.’

‘You will want a cheap one, sir?’

‘Cheap but serviceable.’

‘You will prefer an English make, sir?’

‘Indeed, that’s a most important consideration.’

‘You will perhaps want one with ornamentation, scroll work and roses, for instance?’

‘Oh, no, nothing of the sort, thank you.  What I want is as plain and unobtrusive as possible.’

‘You would like it made of some rustless metal, sir?’

‘That would be very convenient.’

‘And with a strong spring?’

‘Well, moderately strong.’

‘To be fixed on which side, sir?’

‘Let me see; the right-hand side.’

‘Now, sir,’ said the assistant, ‘I will go through each point, one by one.  You want an efficient (but not too costly) English made, unobtrusive, rustless, unornamented, patent automatic door closer, to be fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring to a pantry door with a gas window.  Is there anything further, sir?’

‘Well, it’s very good of you to help me like this,’ said the customer.  ’I should also like it easily adjusted and easily removable, and above all it must not squeak or need constant oiling.’

‘In fact,’ said the clerk, ‘you want an apparatus combining a variety of qualities, in a word, an absolutely silent, efficient, economical, invisible, corrosive-proof, unonramented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily adjustable, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, patent automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every possible respect for attaching your pantry door which (I understand you to say) contains a glass window.  How is that sir?’

‘Splendid, splendid.’

‘Well, sir,’ said the clerk, ‘I regret that there has never been any article of that description put on the market, but if you care to visit our wholesale department across the road, you may perhaps be able to make your selection from a reasonably large assortment of our present imperfect models.  Good day, sir.’

In this holiday season, gdgt.com carries on the spirit of “The Fable of the Ideal Gadget” with its advanced search function on their gadget finder.  Perhaps not ideal, but good enough for the pollyanna.

8pen Inaugurates a New Kind of Gestural Text Entry

The 8pen is a new text input method designed by mobile apps developer 3qubits.  Announced only yesterday, it will be released tomorrow for Android 2.2, with a 1.6 release on the way.

The problem 8pen sets out to tackle is the far too literal virtualization of the QWERTY keyboard into a two inch space that can’t accommodate two hands.  Watch the launch site video to get a better sense of their solution.  It includes a wonderfully condensed media history of keyboards in computing devices, and an alternate history “what if” that asks “if they keyboard was invented today for mobile devices, would it have looked the same?”

What’s so interesting about 8pen is that it mimics the “natural gesture” of handwriting without mimetically reproducing characters.  So, in order to enter “G,” rather than doing this

or this

the user does this

The verb used to describe this action seems important here.  Surely one doesn’t “type” G, nor do they actually “draw” G, since no physical or graphical trace is left on the screen by the finger.  (In this sense, my representations above are a bit misleading).  “Gesture” pops up frequently on the tech blogs in describing this new app, but that too seems inadequate.  With “gesture,” one thinks of a full-bodied, or at least whole-handed, motion in three dimensional space, rather than the swipe of a fingertip across a two dimensional plane.

Also interesting is how many people used the tag “future” in their bookmark of the launch page on Delicious, considering how closely 8pen represents the rotary phone.

Hand Crank Media: Proposal for an archaeology

The hand crank plays a supporting role throughout the history of media. However, from the kinescope to the portable smut viewer to the OLPC cloud computer, the hand crank has served to sync techniques of the body to the various media worlds it inhabits.

Much of early cinema was institutionalized by debating the slippages between the hand cranks of the projector and those of the camera. Theater managers would direct their projectionists to speed up or slow down a reel based on attendance numbers.  Producers would counter by instructing camera operators to shoot as fast as possible to avoid excessively frenetic motion at the point of reception. But for burgeoning cinephiles, only the hand of a virtuoso could discern the proper texture of a moving picture.  F.R. Richardson, in a 1911 issue of Moving Picture World: “The operator ‘renders’ a film, if he is a real operator, exactly as does the musician render a piece of music. … I have often changed speed half a dozen times on one film of 1000 feet.”

The common story is that with the advent of automation, the art of the hand crank and its associated cultural forms are lost.  A media archaeology of the hand crank could short circuit this commonly accepted trajectory of “the art of light and shadow” by constructing an alternate history of moving pictures in which the many half-lives of the hand crank take center stage.

A short list of historical gadgets that were either powered or operated by hand crank:  the graphophone; portable 8mm film viewers (widely marketed alongside porn reels); toys such as the Kenner Blow-a-Tune or Fisher-Price Movie Viewer (which played cartridges containing Loony Tunes, Sesame Street, and instructional films such as diaphragm insertion); the hand charged weather radio and LED flashlight; Kinora flip-book cartridges (German daumenkino = cinema of the thumb); Lyman “Easy Pour Media” for use in the “Hand-Crank Media Sifter” to clean bullet casings; and its close cousin, the 1940s Sarnoff television set colorized by Willemite powder which would be hand poured by the consumer into an ignition chamber at the top of the unit.

As if taking place within an alternate history of electrification in which power was never broadcast outward from centralized generators but produced by and stored within each individual consumer device, the operations uncovered by this archaeology––private viewing in public space, sifting and differentiating, the peep hole, backlighting––will outline a history of media that proceeds as if the standardization of a split second never happened. Read the rest of this entry »