History

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 USA, 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:
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. I have also frequently heard it applied by motor-cycle friends to the collection of fitments to
be seen on motor cycles. '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. In fact, to borrow from present-day
Army slang, 'gadget' is applied to 'any old thing.'[6]
The usage of the term in military parlance extended beyond the navy. In the book Above the
Battle by Vivian Drake, published in 1918 by D. Appleton & Co., of New York and London, being the
memoirs of a pilot in the British Royal Flying Corps, there is the following passage: "Our ennui was
occasionally relieved by new gadgets—'gadget' is the Flying Corps slang for invention! Some
gadgets were good, some comic and some extraordinary."[7]
By the second half of the twentieth century, the term "gadget" had taken on the connotations of
compactness and mobility. In the 1965 essay "The Great Gizmo" (a term used interchangeably with
"gadget" throughout the essay), the architectural and design critic Reyner Banham defines the item
as:
A characteristic class of US products––perhaps the most characteristic––is 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. A class
of servants to human needs, these clip-on devices, these portable gadgets, have coloured American
thought and action far more deeply––I suspect––than is commonly understood.[1]

Other uses
The first atomic bomb was nicknamed the gadget by the Scientists of the Manhattan Project, tested
at the Trinity site.

Application gadgets
In the software industry, Gadget refers to computer programs that provide services without needing
an independent application to be launched for each one, but instead run in an environment that
manages multiple gadgets. There are several implementations based on existing software
development techniques, like JavaScript, form input, and various image formats. Proprietary formats
include Google Desktop, Google Gadgets, Microsoft Gadgets, the AmigaOS
Workbench and dashboard software Apple Widgets.
The earliest[citation needed] documented use of the term gadget in context of software engineering was in
1985 by the developers of AmigaOS, the operating system of the Amiga computers
(intuition.library and also later gadtools.library). It denotes what other technological traditions
call GUI widget—a control element in graphical user interface. This naming convention remains in
continuing use (as of 2008) since then.
The X11[8] windows system 'Intrinsics'[9] also defines gadgets and their relationship to widgets
(buttons, labels, etc.). The gadget was a windowless widget which was supposed to improve the
performance of the application by reducing the memory load on the X server. A gadget would use
the Window id of its parent widget and had no children of its own.
It is not known whether other software companies are explicitly drawing on that inspiration when
featuring the word in names of their technologies or simply referring to the generic meaning. The
word widget is older in this context. In the movie "Back to School" from 1986 by Alan Metter, there is
a scene where an economics professor Dr. Barbay, wants to start for educational purposes a
fictional company that produces "widgets: It's a fictional product."

A smart device is an electronic device, generally connected to other devices or networks via
different wireless protocols (such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, near-field communication, Wi-
Fi, NearLink, LiFi, or 5G) that can operate to some extent interactively and autonomously. Several
notable types of smart devices are smartphones, smart speakers, smart cars, smart
thermostats, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart
refrigerators, phablets and tablets, smartwatches, smart bands, smart keychains, smart glasses, and
many others. The term can also refer to a device that exhibits some properties of ubiquitous
computing, including—although not necessarily—machine learning.
Smart devices can be designed to support a variety of form factors, a range of properties pertaining
to ubiquitous computing and to be used in three main system environments: physical world, human-
centered environments, and distributed computing environments. Smart homes indicate the
presence of sensors and some detection devices, appliances, and a database to control them.

Form factors[edit]
In 1991 Mark Weiser proposed three basic forms for ubiquitous system devices: tabs, pads and
boards.[1]

• Tabs: accompanied or wearable centimetre sized devices, e.g., smartphones, smart

cards
• Pads: hand-held decimetre-sized devices, e.g., laptops
• Boards: meter sized interactive display devices, e.g., horizontal surface computers and
vertical SMART boards.
These three forms proposed by Weiser are characterized by being macro-sized, having a planar
form and by incorporating visual output displays. These were also envisioned more as information
appliances. If each of these three characteristics is relaxed, this range can be expanded into a much
more diverse and potentially more useful range of ubiquitous computing devices.[2]

Characteristics[edit]
Smart devices are typically composed of a hardware layer (including a radio that transmits signals),
a network layer (through which devices communicate with each other), and an application layer
(through which end users deliver commands). These layers often include the following
characteristics:

• A set of system hardware & software IT resources. This set is usually static, fixed at
design time.
• Dynamic component-oriented resource extensions & plug-ins (plug and play) of some
hardware resources.
• Remote external service access and execution.
• Local, internal autonomous service execution.
• Access to specific external environments: human interaction, physical world interaction
and distributed ICT / virtual computing interaction.
• Some ubiquitous computing properties.
Common types of smart devices include:

• Tab and pad type smart devices that often act as personalized smart mobile devices
• Smart environment devices.

Ubiquitous computing properties[edit]

Weiser's vision for ubiquitous computing can be summarized in terms of two core properties:

• Devices need to be networked, distributed and transparently accessible.

• Human–computer interaction with devices is hidden to a degree from its users.
It is proposed that there are two additional core types of properties for ubiquitous computing
systems:[2]

• Devices can operate to some extent autonomously, i.e., without human intervention, be
self-governed.
• Devices can handle a multiplicity of dynamic actions and interactions, governed by
intelligent decision-making and organisational interaction. This may entail some form of
artificial intelligence in order to:
o handle incomplete and non-deterministic interactions
o cooperation and competition between members of organizations
o richer interaction through sharing of context, semantics and goals, etc.
However, it is hard to fix a closed set of properties that define all ubiquitous computing devices
because of the sheer range and variety of ubiquitous computing research and applications. Rather
than to propose a single definition for ubiquitous computing, a taxonomy of properties for ubiquitous
computing has been proposed, from which different kinds or flavours of ubiquitous systems and
applications can be composed and described.[2]
Environments[edit]
The term smart device environments has two meanings. First, it can refer to a greater variety of
device environments. Three different kinds of environments for devices can be differentiated:[2]

• Virtual computing environments that enable smart devices to access pertinent services
anywhere and anytime.
• Physical environments that may be embedded with a variety of smart devices of different
types including tags, sensors and controllers. These can have different form factors
ranging from nano to micro to macro sized.
• Humans environments: humans, either individually or collectively, inherently form a
smart environment for devices. However, humans may themselves be accompanied by
smart devices such as mobile phones, use surface-mounted devices (wearable
computing) and contain embedded devices (e.g., pacemakers to maintain a healthy
heart operation).
Second, the term smart device environments can also refer to the concept of a smart
environment which focuses more specifically on the physical environment of the device. The
physical environment is smart because it is embedded or scattered with smart devices that can
sense and control part of it.