Gadgets

Gadgets /ˈgædʒɪt/

Origin: 1850 – 55

Meaning – ?

Try to find and name devices or appliances in these images.

Note, that the names of some devices are not known.

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Probably, the most popular gadget in the whole world since January 9, 2007 is the iPhone.

It is interesting more for its ingenuity or novelty rather than for its practical use.

• 90 new iPhones are produced each minute

• it costs $188 to make one device

• $150 per month is the wage of worker who assembles iPhones

• $649 is your costs for the iPhone

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These gadgets are ancestors to the iPhone. Some of them, as you can see, are quite outdated and ancient

like Baghdad Battery or Abacus

This old Russian mechanical calculator is much more technically complicated than

and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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the previous gadgets. Even though they are old, they are still unique and interesting.

But without labels you definitely couldn’t name these objects.

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Now we can define exactly what a gadget is

gadget /ˈgædʒɪt/ :

1. a small mechanical device or appliance;

2. any object that is interesting for its ingenuity or novelty rather than for its practical use;

3. a small device, whose name is not known or cannot be recalled;

4. some adroit and unusual contrivance.

Multi-tool, Aibo and Dendy are small gadgets, which have different functions and also different prices.

As you can see, the word 'gadget' is a generic name used when you either don't know the name of a device, or the device doesn't have a name.

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“Gadget” and it’s synonyms usage frequency by books between 1800 and 2008 shows that it’s not very popular word.

Remember synonyms, and try to substitute the word “gadget” on next slides

with:

appliance, doohickey, contraption, contrivance, convenience, gizmo (gismo), thingamajig, whatchamacallit , whatsis, widget

A little bit of statistics and history:

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“It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.”

William Faulkner (American short-story Writer and Novelist, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, 1897-1962)

“A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.”

Francis Picabia (French Painter and Illustrator, 1879-1953)

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• Today's robots that fly, jump or roll around must refuel or recharge as does any gadget that runs out of energy.

• Your spy shop should have a wide range of spy gadgets that will help your surveillance operation.

• No other gadget you can carry in your bag is as valuable.

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Word Origin & History

In 1886, gadjet (but said to date back to 1850s), sailors' slang word for any small mechanical thing or part of a ship for which they lacked, or forgot, a name; perhaps from Fr. gâchette "catchpiece of a mechanism," dim of gâche "staple of a lock."

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

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Unusual gadgets

CHIMP (Chimp Has Invincible Monkey Powers) helps you to see who is sneaking up behind you at work and you’ll never get caught by the boss again.

When you are playing Quake on the local LAN against the support desk staff you need all the help you can get. C.H.I.M.P is an early warning system that will clue you in on when to Alt-Tab back to your spreadsheet when your boss suddenly appears.

How does it work? You just look at it and it magically (with its invincible powers) produces an image of what is behind you. Just like a good C.H.I.M.P. should...

Sure it's stupid, but it works. Tail and face and appendages not included. What's included? A mirror with the word C.H.I.M.P. on it.

11 Universal Binder clip – gadget for everyday use

Clips as Cable Catchers Redux Clips as a player or phone holder

Clips as money clip Clips as a fast repair or even quick fix

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When it comes to phones, notebooks and portable game consoles, smaller is nearly always better. But sometimes a gadget just needs to be really, really huge.

True to their size, gigantic contraptions accomplish tasks enormously useful to our everyday lives. Take for example the Bagger 293 (right), a 14.2-thousand-tones bucket-wheel excavator capable of mining 220,000 tons of brown coal in a day.

And if the only cost-effective way to get the Bagger 293 to the mine is to drive it across the Rhineland countryside, so much the better. Because people love to gawk at gigantic machines.

Towering 310 feet high and weighing 14.2 thousand tones, the Bagger 293 holds a Guinness World Record as the largest and heaviest land vehicle in the world. The machine, shown above, looks and sounds intimidating, but its operation is actually quite simple: 18 gigantic buckets are attached to a giant wheel; when the wheel rotates, the buckets scoop up earth and dump it onto a conveyor belt. Each bucket is capable of holding each of which can hold over 15 cubic meters of earth — about the equivalent of 80 bathtubs. The Bagger 293 now resides in brown-coal mine in Hambach, Germany, awaiting the day when it will again be free to roam the Earth.

Bucket-Wheel Excavator

13 Crawler-transporter

Spacecraft make their way to the Launch Pad with some help from the crawler-transporter, a 2,400-tones tracked vehicle current being used to transport NASA’s space shuttles. Spanning 40-by-35 meters, the crawler-transporter has 16 traction motors, powered by four 1,341-horsepower generators and driven by two 2,750-horsepower diesel engines. The crawler-transporter burns 296 liters of diesel oil per kilometer.

14 Solar Furnace

This beautiful, giant mirror isn’t an art exhibit; it’s actually a solar furnace capable of reaching temperatures as high as 3000 degrees Celcius. Located in Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via (a commune in the south of France), the furnace acts as a giant magnifying glass. The hillside opposite of the structure consists of hundreds of flat mirrors, which reflect a beam of sunlight onto the curved mirror to concentrate light onto a focal point. Solar furnaces like this one are used for melting steel, generating electricity, and even converting CO2 into fuel. They would be serious, serious overkill for burning helpless little ants.

15 Supertanker

Airplanes not only fly us around the globe for our getaways; they double as giant fire extinguishers. In August, the Supertanker — a Boeing 747 modified into an aerial firefighter — dumped 77, 600 liters of retardant over Los Angeles to put out 105,000 acres of blazing land. The Supertanker carries a special pressurized delivery system to fire retardant with considerable accuracy; the modded aircraft cost $50 million to develop.

The Supertanker utilizes advanced avionics and flies at higher, safer altitudes, which will enable fire agencies the option of fighting fires at night, while they are dormant.

16 Large Hadron Collider

How could we leave this one out? The poorly named Large Hadron Collider, which lies in a 27 kilometres tunnel underneath the border of France and Switzerland, is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Scientists dream that the accelerator, once it’s fully online, will unlock the deepest secrets of the universe.

How? Slamming subatomic particles together at incredible speeds causes them to shatter, revealing insights into the subtle details of quantum physics. The accelerator is so powerful, in fact, that some doomsayers think it’s capable of producing a black hole that could destroy the planet — a theory that has since been debunked.

17 Tunnel Boring Machine

Ever wonder how a tunnel is born? Tunnel-boring machines, like the monster on the right. At the front is a circular, rotating cutting wheel used to bore through hard rock, soil and sand. Behind the cutting wheel is a chamber where the excavated soil is collected. The machines on the right is the Herrenknecht Gripper TBMs S-210 series used to excavate Gotthard Base. They use 4 such machines to bore tunnel from 8,83m to 9.58m in diameter and 154,84km long. How good are they? Actually up to 30 meters within 24 hours, but on July 19, 2009 54m within 24 hours was reached – this is the really impressive performance.

18 Giant Diesel Engine

Don’t mess with this bad boy. The behemoth above is an 108,000 horsepower diesel engine designed to power large cargo ships. Dubbed the Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C, this turbocharged, two-stroke engine has from 6 to 14 cylinders (on the photo is one with 10 cylinders), each measuring about 960mm in diameter and producing about 7,650 horsepower each. Altogether, the engine weighs approximately 2,300 tons and consumes is 3,8 liters of fuel oil per second at full load. And you thought you had to pay through the nose at the pump?

19 E-126 Wind Turbine

Currently the largest wind turbine in the world, the Enercon E-126 stands at 126 meters high. The weight of the foundation of the turbine tower is about 2,500 t, the tower itself 2,800 t, the machine housing 128 t, the generator 220 t, the rotor (including the blade) 364 t. The total weight is about 6,000 t.

It features new technologies to improve its efficiency converting the movement of the air into electrical energy. The E-126 does not have permanent magnets, so avoiding the bad environmental imprint of rare earth mining i.e. Neodymium.

The result? Seven megawatts of energy — enough to power 5,000 European homes. The first turbines of the E-126 were installed in Emden, Germany.

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Used information and photo from: http://books.google.com/ngrams/ http://dictionary.reference.com http://geekosystem.com http://digitalnerds.net http://en.wikipedia.org http://habrahabr.ru http://herrenknecht.com http://lifehacker.com http://technology.am http://thefreedictionary.com http://thinkgeek.com http://wired.com http://worldwidewords.org and a lot of other sites and pages which I didn’t remember or they are lost.

© 2012 Bohdan Padalko <[email protected]>