03/15/2023
Happy Women's History Month! Learn the impact one woman has had on the security industry in this article from the Society of Women Engineers:
"The camera in your doorbell owes a debt of thanks to African American inventor Marie Van Brittan Brown (1922–1999). A native of Jamaica, Queens, New York, Brown worked as a nurse, often coming home late at night. Her husband, Albert, was an electronics technician with an irregular schedule. Often, one of them was home alone. Concerned about her neighborhood’s high crime rate and slow police response, Brown set about solving the problem of seeing who was at the door before she answered it.
In the mid 1960s, assisted by her husband, she invented a system of four peepholes, a sliding camera, television monitors, and a two-way microphone that constituted a wireless, closed-circuit television (CCTV) system for home surveillance. The peepholes were set in the door at ascending heights, allowing the camera to slide from one to the other to capture images of people of all heights. Monitors in the apartment picked up the images through wireless radio.
With two-way voice communication with the person outside, this system could not only contact police with the push of a button, but another button remotely controlled the door locks. All together, it formed the basis of systems still in use today, everywhere from convenience stores and banks to office buildings and apartment complexes.
The Browns received a patent for their invention in 1969. Soon after, Brown was interviewed by The New York Times, saying, “A woman alone could set off an alarm immediately by pressing a button, or if the system were installed in a doctor’s office, it might prevent holdups by drug addicts.
Brown is widely credited for creating CCTV, and received an award from the National Scientists Committee for her work. Her invention has been cited in 32 subsequent patent applications, one as recently as 2013, for a wireless entrance communication device. "
Source:
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