Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead

Among a collection of mounted kitchen utensils, what appears to be the scraps of a lithographic magazine advertisement remain on the wall in Walker Evans’s “Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead” (1936, gelatin silver print).  Hamlin Garland documented the practice in his collection of stories Main-Traveled Roads (1891).

Then they entered the house, into the sitting room, poor, bare, art-forsaken little room, too, with its rag carpet, its square clock, and its two or three chromos [chromolithographs] and pictures from Harper’s Weekly pinned about.

-Hamlin Garland, “The Return of a Private”

Then came again the assertive odor of stagnant air, laden with camphor; he felt the springless bed under him, and caught dimly a few soap-advertising lithographs on the walls.  He thought of his brother, in his still more inhospitable bedroom, disturbed by the child, condemned to rise at five o’clock and begin another day’s pitiless labor.

-Hamlin Garland, “Up the Coulee“

In the Pocket

Somewhere between 1915 and 1920, a gesture as simple as fumbling through one’s pocket came to signify a completely different kind of cultural technique.  Rather than sifting among a private collection of utilitarian or discarded objects, the user of the “pocket wireless” receiver now opened himself up to a “receptive situation” in which live bits of information (time, weather, stock quotes) or messages from home might be skimmed from the airwaves.

Five or six years ago, [Leon W. Bishop of Elizabeth, NJ] won a reputation as being more or less of a nut because he might often be seen walking about the streets with wires dangling from his hat and running down to a cane, while another wire trailed from one foot.  Occasionally Bishop would hold out his cane, put one hand in his pocket, fumble with something—and announce that he was receiving a wireless message.  Today almost anyone would know what he was doing, but five or six years ago the man who knew anything about wireless was an exception and unless Bishop took the time to let spectators ‘listen in’ to the dots and dashes, no one believed him.

(Binns, Jack, “Amateurs Race to Make Vest-Pocket Set,” New-York Tribune, February 19, 1922, p. 6.  Above, illustration from F.H. Collins’s 1898 patent application for the Magneto Ear Phone.)

Gadgets and Wrinkles

Part of my research right now is directed toward the idea that the word “gadget” denotes a completely different range of tools at different points throughout the twentieth century. Though today we usually associate gadgetry with portable electronics, the word has its roots in nineteenth century nautical jargon.  In use among sailors as early as the 1850s, the word first appears in print in Robert Brown’s 1887 memoir Spurnyarn and Spindrift: A Sailor Boy’s Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-Clipper.  He writes, “the names of all the other things on board a ship!  I don’t know half of them yet; 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.”  In its seemingly simple and utilitarian origins, the word serves as a placeholder for the name of a tool that has been forgotten at the moment.

The functionality of the gadget in this nautical context receives a more sophisticated treatment in Harold Augustin Calahan’s wonderful Gadgets and Wrinkles: A Compendium of Man’s Ingenuity at Sea.  Calahan begins this book, a catalog of potential problems one might encounter sailing followed by a list of “gadgets” and “wrinkles” that serve as solutions, by encouraging the reader to think about the gadget in a much wider sense than has been commonly allowed.

Our lexicographers define a gadget as ‘anything the name of which cannot be recalled at the moment,’ and in parentheses, they add ‘(Slang, U.S. Navy)’.  But the name has a broader meaning and a riper antiquity than the dictionary credits.  I believe the term is older than the navy itself, and far too deeply imbedded in the language to merit the transitory stigma of slang.

Calahan clarifies that while “a gadget is a machine, an invention, a mechanical means of achieving a result, a wrinkle is a method of procedure.  […]  To the seaman, a gadget is a thing, and a wrinkle is a method, and both of them for the most part unusual and unstandardized.”  The problem that he encounters throughout the book, one that repeatedly causes him to go off on long digressions, is that the distance between a tool and a method is not readily identifiable.

I have been sore put to it to organize this book.  For I am dealing with concepts that have thus far resisted organization so well that they have avoided being tagged with names.  Also it is pretty hard to tell where a gadget begins and a wrinkle ends or vice versa.  Take a familiar example.  You are about to tie two lines together.  You tie them into a weaver’s knot.  Standard practice so far––no gadgets, no wrinkles.  Then realizing that there is going to be a terrific strain on that line and that the knot will be pulled so tight that you will never be able to untie it again, you decide to slip a toggle into the knot.  That’s a happy thought, for you can always take a hammer and drive out the toggle and the knot will be loose.  What is that toggle––a winkle or a gadget?  Now suppose we decide that the strain is going to be so great that it will be difficult to drive out an ordinary toggle.  So we use a large fid whose sloping shape assures us that the slightest driving with the hammer will loosen the knot.  Is the wrinkle now a gadget?  Or if the small end of the fid is greased to make it slip more easily through the tight turns of the knot, does it become a wrinkle again?  I don’t know and I don’t pretend to try to find out.  The line of demarcation is too indistinct.

Surveying the history of gadgetry at sea, Calahan gives the term a wide enough purchase to include not only the tools but the methods that emerge to accomplish certain tasks.  This relationship between the materials and styles of performing a task or solving a problem often surfaces in definitions of gadgetry, especially in patent law.  Court decisions over patent disputes usually end up defining a gadget as the solution that logically emerges out of a problem in material form as a tool or modification.  Any reasonable person given the same problem would independently come up with the same expedient.  An invention, on the other hand, is a truly original arrangement or innovation that warrants patent protection.

"Problem –– Gadget –– Solution!"

The deceivingly simple origins of the gadget as “a generic name for anything” in fact already contained some of the complexities that would provide the word such a wide applicability throughout the twentieth century.  As Virginia Sackville-West observes in Country Notes (1940), “What an odd little word ‘gadget’ is, almost a gadget in itself, so small and useful.”

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.

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.