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History The origins of the word “gadget” trace back to the 1800s. 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.[2] The etymology of the word is disputed. A widely circulated story holds that the word gadget was “invented” when Gaget, Gauthier & Cie, the company behind the casting 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 until after World War I.[2] 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.[2] The spring-clip used to hold the base of a vessel during glass-making is also known as a gadget.[citation needed] The first atomic bomb was nicknamed the gadget by the scientists of the Manhattan Project, tested at the Trinity site.
