Smart TVs, Smart watches, Smart phones, Smart houses.. how did things become smart? As far as I can determine, the 'smart [thing]' linguistic construct started with 'smart bomb', a propaganda euphemism for guided bombs that emerged in the 70s. Does anybody have an earlier example?
There were "smart cards" in 1974, "smart casual" dress codes in 1924, and "Smart Set" magazine in 1900.
A more careful look will surely find older and more relevant examples.
Amusingly "smart money" and "smart tickets" existed in the 18th century, referring to the results of injuries ("ow, that smarts!"). See: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/smart
I don't think any of these are examples of it. Smart cards in 1974 postdate smart bombs. "Smart casual" fashion is smart in the "Good-looking; well dressed; fine; fashionable" sense, while smart bomb/phone are being used in this sense: "(often in combination) Equipped with intelligent behaviour (digital/computer technology)."
Smart bombs weren't called smart for being fashionably well dressed. The term was applied to guided bombs with fire-and-forget capabilities, which were first used during the Vietnam War.
A smartass is a person, not a technological artifact.
I don't mean to be nitpicky. There are a lot of ways the word smart has been paired with other words. But "smart [object]", where object is some bit of technology that is suggested to have intelligence in it is really what I'm looking for. If somebody in the 1950s had marketed "smart headlights" that automatically turn on at night, that would be an example of what I'm looking for. But I haven't found anything like that prior to "smart bombs."
Being nitpicky is fine. You asked about the "linguistic construct". I went and did a little bit of research on terms that looked like they fit that pattern. It's worth supposing that the idea didn't appear from nowhere, and indeed there were "smart X" before smart bombs with a close but different meaning for "smart", and seemingly unrelated "smart Y" appearing around the same time having the same "intelligent technology" association. This looks like a linguistic trend to me.
I don't doubt that if I read more I'd find the thing you're looking for from before the first mention of "smart bombs" (first I found was US government documents from 1970) but I'm not going to spend any longer at it, so I wrote my findings and sources in the hope it would be helpful.
By the way, Google {Books, NGrams, Patent} were also useful. There have been various things called "smart cards" for a long time. Also the dates on Google Books (and hence NGrams?) are frequently wrong and you really have to look at the front matter to check.
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/26/archives/smart-bombs-and-...