GADGETS AND GIZMOS THAT INSPIRED ADAM SMITH

MEDITATIONS ON THE DANGEROUS, ALLURING BEAUTY OF INTRICATE SYSTEMS

- VIRGINIA POSTREL

POCKET GADGETS WERE all the rage in Adam Smith’s day. Their popularity inspired one of the most paradoxical, charming, and insightful passages in his work.

The best known are watches. A pocket timepiece was an 18th century man’s must-have fashion accessory, its presence indicated by a ribbon or bright steel chain hanging from the owner’s waist, bedecked with seals and a watch key. Contemporary art depicts not just affluent people but sailors and farm workers sporting watch chains. One sailor even wears two. “It had been the pride of my life, ever since pride commenced, to wear a watch,” wrote a journeyman stocking maker about acquiring his first in 1747.

Laborers could buy watches secondhand and pawn them when they needed cash. A favorite target for pickpockets, “watches were consistently the most valuable item of apparel stolen from working men in the eighteenth century,” writes historian John Styles, who analyzed records from several English jurisdictions.

But timepieces were hardly the only gizmos stuffing 18th century pockets, especially among the well-to-do. At a coffeehouse, a gentleman might pull out a silver nutmeg grater to add spice to his drink or a pocket globe to make a geographical point. The scientifically inclined might carry a simple microscope, known as a flea glass, to examine flowers and insects while strolling through gardens or fields. He could gaze through a pocket telescope and then, with a few twists, convert it into a mini-microscope. He could improve his observations with a pocket tripod or camera obscura and could pencil notes in a pocket diary or on an erasable sheet of ivory. (Not content with a single sheet, Thomas Jefferson carried ivory pocket notebooks.)