The story of the smart home ancestors - Thick and complicated
The first smart home ideas emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. While they didn't involve fully automating one's home back then, the goals have always been the same: more convenience in everyday life and easier housework.
The first successful innovations were introduced in 1901 with an electric vacuum cleaner. In the following years, other electronic appliances entered households and were continually developed further. These included refrigerators, washing machines and dryers, toasters, etc.
The first ideas about a smart home emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, American author Ray Bradbury wrote a short story about a fully automated home with intelligent assistants that even outlived humanity.
The first such implementation occurred in 1966, when the American engineer James Sutherland developed the first device with the idea of a fully automated home: the ECHO IV ( Electronic Computing Home Operator ) . A huge, room - sized computer that weighed around 360 kilograms and was about 25,000 times slower than ours today.
It could run simple learning programs, turn the TV on/off, control the temperature, display the time in real time, and had an alarm function. For the first computer, it had quite a lot of potential. Still, it wasn't enough to make it onto the market. Instead, it was seen as a guide to the future and revolutionized the future in later years.
In the following years, additional technical devices were introduced in a wide variety of areas, intended to serve as assistants to people. However, due to the prohibitive prices and size of the devices, they were initially not accepted by the public. It wasn't until almost three decades later, in the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, that home automation became more advanced. The first automatically driving and controllable household helpers, such as robotic lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners, came onto the market, and the networking of various systems such as heating, shading, and lighting became more widely known and, from the new millennium onward, also affordable for consumers.
The great-grandmother of Siri, Google & Alexa
Like the first computer, another technological breakthrough was introduced in 1966: the first chatbot, ELIZA. Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum designed a program that enabled written communication. It recognized keywords in sentences and responded by writing a sentence associated with the recognized keyword.
Subsequently, chatbots were further developed and released by numerous companies, initially for home computers, such as speech recognition in Windows Vista in 2007. In 2010, Apple acquired Siri. Just one year later, Siri, the very first voice assistant for smartphones, was introduced with the iPhone 4s. Within the next four years, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon followed suit with their own voice assistants, which have continued to grow in popularity to this day.
You can find out more about the three most popular voice assistants in other articles on our blog.
Smart Home today
Today's smart home is certainly no longer "big and complicated" like it was over 50 years ago. This field has been continually perfected over the decades. Today, smart homes focus on convenience, energy efficiency, and security. It's important that all devices are connected to each other, individually configured, and can be remotely controlled and managed via a mobile app. For example, the alarm system can be activated in the morning as soon as you walk out the door. At the same time, the door locks, the smart lights turn off, and the robot vacuum starts cleaning.
You can find a very detailed explanation considering all aspects in our blog.
Images: US Army Photos, via https://ftp.arl.army.mil/ftp/historic-computers/